


Veins Fit to Bursting

by amagpie



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Buffy The Vampire Slayer Fusion, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Bloodplay, Depression, Friends to Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending, Human Quentin, M/M, Vampire Eliot, Vampire Slayer Julia, Vampires, Vampirism as a metaphor, dubiously consensual biting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-07-30 08:51:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 39,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20094595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amagpie/pseuds/amagpie
Summary: Living near a hellmouth and fighting the forces of darkness can feel pretty routine for Quentin Coldwater, but the return of an old friend, long-assumed dead, is sure to challenge that life and his worldview.Or: The Buffy AU.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of this is written and/or plotted, but I had to get the first few chapters up so I would stop myself from editing them. 
> 
> A little warning that some main characters are vampires, which means there will be some killing and blood drinking. I'm not going too dark with it, but it will be discussed. 
> 
> If you're not familiar with the Buffy rules for vampires, they're pretty classic, and relevant ones will be explained or referenced. While there's a lot of debate about what a "soul" actually is or does in Buffy, it functions kind of like shades in the Magicians, so I think conceptualizing it like that if you're unfamiliar should be fine. 
> 
> Also, as always, we're aiming for a happy ending with all points of conflict here.

The night wind howls through the late September air, curling over and pounding against gravestones, bringing dirt and bits of early fallen leaves to rest. The moon shines brightly, but waxing. Quentin would almost think the universe is being creepy on purpose, but graveyards are just like that sometimes. 

Quentin walks with light steps, his feet barely crunching against the twigs on the earth. He’s got a stake, a bottle of holy water, and a mission. It’s one in the morning. It’s time to help.

With the stake clutched in his hand, he ducks behind one of the fancier gravestones. There’s a plot of fresh dirt right around the corner, which means there’s going to be a new vampire tonight. The fresh ones are always a little easier to kill if they’re still disoriented from the climb. Quentin waits, calming his breathing and trying to center himself the way he’s read about, the way he’s practiced so many times. The breaths provide minimal relief to his anxious heart.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

Quentin hears the tell-tale sounds of someone crawling out of their grave. A sound he’s heard far too many times over the past few years of his life.

He waits another minute - he’s learned the hard way that trying to stake them before their chest is completely exposed is just awkward for everyone involved. Once he finishes counting to sixty in his head, Quentin peaks around the gravestone. Oh good, the vampire has his back to him, and he doesn’t look too big, body still clothed in the suit he must have been laid to rest in. This shouldn’t be too bad.

Quentin sneaks around the grave, stake held high, prepared to strike through the vampire’s back to get to his heart. He goes for the lunge, but, unfortunately, Quentin’s powers of stealth have their limits, and the vamp must hear him coming, because he turns around when Quentin is about two feet from stabbing him. 

Quentin’s caught awkwardly frozen, stake raised. “Um-“

“What the hell?” The vampire looks pissed and confused, his forehead twisted demonically. “What are you doing with that?”

Quentin glances nervously at the stake. “Um, sorry, but I’m going to kill you.”

“Aww, c’mon, man, don’t do that,” the guy -vampire- whines. He can’t be older than eighteen.

“No, sorry, I have to.” Quentin says it almost like a question. 

“Ugh.” The vampire seems to collect himself and come to terms with the unfairness of the universe in record time. “Fine, if you insist.”

Quentin thrusts forward, adrenaline pumping, his intention to make this as quick and painless as possible. Before he can even get close to meeting his target, the vamp jumps into action and gives Quentin a roundhouse kick that sends him flying.

“Shit,” Quentin moans from the ground. 

“Dude, I’m like so strong! My kicks were never that good in class.”

“I’m so happy for you,” Quentin wheezily deadpans. He pulls himself to his knees, trying to slink away, regroup, anything to get back the upper hand. The nerve of the fight is quickly turning into the anxiety of escape. 

He’s stopped by a kick to his back and pain radiates through him. Air rushes from Quentin’s lungs as his body pounds against the ground, and the panic of not being able to breathe takes over his mind. The vamp grabs his hair, pulls him up, throws him back down. Quentin cries out as his arm slices against a sharp edge of a gravestone.

“Oh my god, that smells so good. Is that blood?”

Quentin manages to turn himself over, although now that means he’s met with the sight of a hungry vampire bearing down towards him. He swipes his feet out and manages to get the vamp’s legs out from under him. He scrambles for his stake, but can’t find it in arm’s reach. 

He makes a sound of frustration, then throws himself on top of the vamp and manages to land a good punch against his face.

The vampire laughs in his face.

Quentin has no idea what kind of training this guy had in life, but whatever it was, it means he easily flips their positions so that Quentin is pinned against the dirt while a vampire plays with his food.

For the first time all night, Quentin has the thought that he might actually die here.

The thought is strange, like someone else is thinking it. The survival instinct of fear he’s been running on through the fight is still there, but now it has to war with the twisted thought that death may be coming.

He’s not thinking when his body relaxes against the ground.

“Sorry, man,” the vampire laughs with insincerity. Quentin clenches his eyes closed as the vampire lunges at his neck, then-

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Julia.

The vampire is pulled off him.

Heart pounding, he opens his eyes and scrambles back into a sitting position against a grave.

Julia lands a punch, and a kick, and even though the vampire is able to fight back, he’s no match for Julia.

“Who are you?” The vampire cries in disbelief, the previous irreverence nowhere in sight.

“I’m Julia, the vampire slayer. And you are?”

The vamp’s eyes go wide, and before he can say anything more, Julia plunges a stake through his heart. The vampire explodes in a cloud of dust.

Julia brushes her pants. “Somehow that never gets any less messy.”

She stalks over to him and offers him a hand. He sheepishly accepts and lets her pull him up fast with her slayer strength, but he overbalances a little and almost falls over. She steadies him.

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

She stares sadly at the spot where the vamp turned to dust. “He was young. I haven’t seen a teen vamp in awhile, I kind of forgot how little they look.”

“That was us not too long ago.”

“We never looked that young.”

Quentin gives a tight smile, the smile fighting through the frown to barely push through. “No, you’re right, we were always mature and never had acne or braces that stayed on for too long. That must have been my imagination.”

“You’re supposed to let me forget about embarrassing dentistry.” She playfully punches his arm, but he yells, her punch managing to land right where the headstone cut him.

Her face scrunches up in sympathy, “Sorry.”

For the first time, he actually looks at his cut. It doesn’t feel too bad, but it looks it: gnarled and red and still sluggishly bleeding. “It’s fine.” He scrunches up his sleeve over the cut to help put pressure on it.

“What are you doing out here, Q?”

He keeps himself wrapped up in the task of wound-care, hoping that maybe she’ll drop it. He chances a glance back at her, but she’s still staring at him expectantly. No such luck.

“You said you might not be able to patrol tonight.”

“So you took it upon yourself to play slayer?”

“I was trying to help.” She gives him a stern look. “I almost had him.”

“You almost had a hole in the neck.”

“I’m fine.” He presses harder on the gash, willing it to stop bleeding already and save him from the humiliation of getting hurt.

Julia’s voice reverbs in the quiet night, voice tinged with frustration. “I can’t focus on slaying if I’m saving you from getting hurt.”

Quentin’s pride hurts more than his wound. 

“Can we table this?” Quentin asks, voice thinner than he’d like. “I’d rather not fight in a cemetery.”

“Okay.” She looks at him intently, lips pressing into a stressed line. She looks like she wants to keep pushing at it, but instead takes his hand and leads him out of the graveyard.

At the late hour, they hardly have to watch out for any cars on the mile-long trek from the cemetery to his apartment. Julia’s insisted that she take care of his cut for real, and he’s done arguing with her, so he lets her pamper him a bit. It makes him feel a bit useless, but he pushes that down.

They enter, Quentin flicking the lights on, setting down his keys, and pulling out the supplies. He’s had to keep his first aid kit well-stocked over the years.

“Give me that.” Julia holds a hand out for his kit.

In his bedroom, she pats alcohol into his cut. The sting of his skin feels like nails on a chalkboard.

She works in silence. The only sounds breaking the late-night stillness are Quentin’s intermittent hisses and labored breathing.

“Please remember you’re human,” Julia says quietly. “Because all the creepy crawlers will remember for you if you don’t.”

“I will.” It’s not like he can forget. He’s well aware that he’s human, average, powerless. But that doesn’t mean he can’t still help. He may not be a witch like Alice or a slayer like Julia or a trained fighter like Kady or a watcher like Dean Fogg, but he can be a helper.

“I need you around, Q. With everything that Fogg and I are learning about what it means to be a slayer, all the training I’m doing, it’s so easy to get caught up in it. You’re my anchor. Please, promise me you’ll stay safe.”

“I promise.”

How can he keep himself safe and sound when he knows there’s evil, true evil, in the world? What kind of a person would he be if he didn’t throw himself at the problem recklessly? His happiness and safety feel like noble costs.

After she leaves, with a kiss on his cheek and a promise to see him tomorrow, Quentin curls up against his window and stares out into the night. All these houses and apartments, people inside, and nobody knows. Nobody else knows how dark the world is, the demons and vampires that walk among them, slowly picking off the populace if it weren’t for this ragtag team of misfits he’s found himself in. Everyone else gets to be happy, but it’s his duty to shoulder the burden of the knowledge of evil.

He’s so lost in his empty thoughts that he almost doesn’t see it.

The street lamp that always flickers is flickering, which he usually finds more annoying than ominous, but now, for just a moment, it lights up someone he hasn’t seen in a very many years. Someone who he knows to be very much dead.

“Eliot Waugh?” He wonders aloud.

Quentin blinks and he’s gone. 


	2. Chapter 2

It’s been a week, and Quentin hasn’t seen another glimpse of Eliot, so he’s starting to think, with the late hour and all the stress of almost getting his throat ripped out, that he might have been hallucinating. With classes starting up again for the fall semester at his small New Jersey college, and there always being some new demon around trying to raise hell - literally - Quentin hasn’t really had the time to focus too much on the possibility that someone he knew years ago might still be around. 

During a break between classes, he squishes himself into a corner booth in the cafe - a position that affords him the least amount of eyes able to see his general presence existing in the world - and pulls out his phone. He pulls up Facebook, at first just intending to pass the time, then somehow finds himself typing ‘Eliot Waugh’. 

It’s surreal to see someone dead with an active profile page, the consistent annual flood of RIPs and condolences that lessen a bit every year still trickling in. Eliot’s young face stares up at him from the screen, and Quentin is hit with a wave of sadness. He had been so young. It hadn’t felt young at the time, but now that Quentin is years away from high school, he can recognize how short Eliot’s life was.

They had been … friendly, maybe friends. Quentin mostly hung around Julia and whoever she decided to be friends with, and he’s pretty sure Eliot did theater. Eliot had still had a newness about him when he died, fresh off the boat from Indiana. He’s not sure if they were the kind of friends who would have lasted past high school - but there’s no use thinking like that, because they never got the chance anyway. 

Eliot is dead.

For all the time that Quentin spent contemplating his own death in his formative years, he actually hadn’t really considered the possibility of those around him dying. Eliot’s death had been the first one to break him of that illusion. But then, life had gotten so much harder. He thought Eliot would be the first and only, but then Julia was called and suddenly Quentin had an inside scoop into the darkness of the world and how many people vampires could kill. It had been a lot to take in as a seventeen year old. 

Now, Quentin is older and wiser. On his good days, Quentin feels like he can probably handle the darkness of the world. And Quentin knows enough now to question the supposed death of Eliot Waugh.

At the time, everyone knew it was an accident, and he had no reason not to believe the official statement. But now? Now Quentin can entertain some wilder theories.

Given his best friend’s occupation, the obvious possibility is that Eliot was turned into a vampire. But they’ve battled a lot of things over the years that could all wear someone’s face or raise the dead: necromancers, shapeshifters, ghosts, demons with names too hard to pronounce.

Before, Quentin just felt sad at the long-passed fact of Eliot’s death, but now he feels sick with the thought that something truly horrific may have befallen him. Nobody deserves to be turned into a blood-sucking fiend, to have their humanity stripped away. 

It would be better for everyone involved if what he saw was just a trick of the light and sleep deprivation.

* * *

After a brief rundown of recent demonic activity with the gang and check in with Julia, Quentin trudges home. He has to walk past the graveyard to get there, and tonight, he swears he isn’t trying to play hero. 

Quentin hears someone cry for help, and he can’t just ignore it. It’s not who he is. 

He slips a stake into his hand and, his conscience warring with his self-preservation instinct, he sprints into the graveyard.

He slows his pace as he gets closer to the noise, wondering if he can be stealthy about this.

They’re not hard to find; Quentin only has to follow the sound of whimpering to find the demon. He ducks behind a mausoleum, and twists himself close to the ground to go unnoticed. He can see two people, two men, one pressed against a tomb and another bearing down on him, head tucked close. 

There’s no time to waste. If Quentin keeps playing it safe, then whoever is being hurt is just going to keep on being hurt and possibly die. Quentin can’t let that happen.

“Hey!” Quentin shouts, hopping out from behind his hiding place. 

The man pops his head up, startled, and pulls back from the other guy’s neck.

“Get away from him.” Quentin’s heart is pounding in his ears. 

The man steps back and holds his hands up above his head, wiggling his fingers. The other guy clutches a hand to his neck and takes the opportunity to slink away, breaking into a bolt.

The man turns to face him, and Quentin feels like his heart is hit with a bag of bricks. The man before him, the man who had someone pinned in a graveyard, the man who was biting that poor guy’s neck, the man that Quentin raced in here to kill, is none other than Eliot Waugh. 

The last time Quentin saw Eliot alive, he was wearing flannel and looked like he wanted to be anywhere but the body and space he was currently occupying. This? Is not that.

Eliot holds himself like a king presiding over court, his back straight and chin tilted up even as he keeps his arms raised in exaggerated surrender. His curls masterfully fall along his neck, and his fitted waistcoat and shirt sing dark colors but a loud pattern. 

Eliot looks more alive than he’s ever seen him before. Quentin is dazzled.

Which is unfortunate, because Eliot has blood on his mouth and is definitely a vampire. Quentin can feel his face crumble.

“Quentin Coldwater?” Eliot seems half delighted to see him and half-horrified at the reminder of his, admittedly, fantastical name. Quentin is a bit surprised that he remembers him.

Quentin opens his mouth to speak, and nothing comes out.

Eliot’s face settles on delighted. He lowers his arms and settles them across his chest, leaning forward on the balls of his feet. The coy smile and brightness of his eyes makes him look like a panther, and Quentin feels a hint of fear swell up in his chest. “It’s been years. To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“What were you doing?” Quentin manages to grit out. 

“Oh, you know, just-“ Eliot gestures to the graves scattered around them. “-hanging around. You know how it goes: can’t sleep, might as well take a walk through a cemetery.”

Eliot inches to the side, and Quentin matches him, circling away. 

“Yeah,” Quentin breathes out. “Our town has so many, they’re easy to stumble across.”

“Too easy.” Eliot’s eyes flash. “And what brings you here?”

“Uh- same. Just a walk.”

Eliot’s eyes harden, and his posture shifts from languorous monarch to poised predator. 

“So it has nothing to do with the stake clutched behind your back? I never took you as the ... physical type back in school.”

Quentin tries to swallow, but his mouth is dry. “A lot’s changed.”

“It has, hasn’t it.”

They circle each other, Quentin’s back now to the tomb Eliot had been pressing that guy against. But Eliot doesn’t move any closer to him, keeps his distance like he’s got all the time in the world. 

“You have blood on your mouth,” Quentin states. 

“Oops.” Eliot shrugs and wipes his mouth. “I got impatient.”

“I could kill you.”

Eliot looks at him with a quizzical expression, like a cat waiting for food. His lips almost turn down into a pout. “Why?”

“Wha- What do you mean why? You’re a vampire,” Quentin says. 

“You being astute enough to get that fact from a little blood is going to save us a world of exposition, but you seem to have a very hostile relationship to my kind.”

“You’re a murderer.”

“That’s a little harsh. I would call myself more of a blood connoisseur.”

Quentin lets out a mirthless laugh. “And where does that blood come from?”

“Usually, it comes from very willing participants.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “Usually.”

“Well, sometimes over-confident super nerds think they can play judge, jury, and executioner and need to be drained back into place,” Eliot bites out.

Quentin clutches his stake tighter. He doesn’t know if he can win against Eliot - he’s not the oldest vampire they’ve fought, but Quentin is alone. Quentin is so goddamn alone and he’s grateful that the other guy got away, but now he’s the one in danger and could really use a savior himself. 

He remembers his water bottle he keeps full of holy water. If he can just slip it out of his bag, maybe he can distract Eliot long enough to get away-

“You should be more careful,” Eliot cuts off his train of thought. 

Quentin pauses in his plans and confusion grows. Eliot said that less like a threat and more like a careful warning. 

“Yeah, well…” Quentin trails off, thoughts spinning. “So should you.” Not the best comeback he’s ever thought of, but it’ll have to do. 

Eliot smiles, and even though he’s wearing his human visage, it looks like it’s all teeth. “I’m honored by the concern. Now, as fun as it’s been to catch up, I really should be going.” 

Before Quentin can even pull out his water bottle, Eliot backs away. “See you around, Coldwater.” Eliot turns and fades into the darkness of the graveyard.

Quentin stands stock still, frozen in place. 

Quentin almost wants to call after him  _ wait, I still have to kill you  _ before he realizes how insane that would be. 

The thought is followed by a resounding  _ What the fuck? _

Why didn’t Eliot kill him? 

Quentin walks home, one part of his brain constantly looking over his shoulder, waiting for Eliot to play cat to his mouse. But it never comes. He doesn’t trail after him, he doesn’t stalk him. He didn’t even try to bite him. Hell, he didn’t even yell at him for scaring his food away. 

Dissonance grows under his skin: vampires are supposed to be straightforward killers. They’re supposed to bite, suck, kill, and run. It’s what every watcher journal says, what Dean Fogg says, what they’ve seen these past few years in their hell of a town. 

But Eliot didn’t do that. 

Quentin knows Eliot must still be  _ bad  _ in that fundamental vampire way. But he’s going about it totally differently. Quentin has no idea who he even is now, where he’s going, or if he plans to stick around. 

Quentin doesn’t know if he has the wherewithal to process all of this. He does not want to deal with this, he doesn’t want to do this. Maybe if he tells Julia, she’ll take care of it. But then he realizes that if he tells her, she’ll succeed in  _ taking care of it _ and kill Eliot. And Quentin doesn’t have the space for an old friend to be dead, and then a vampire, and then dead-dead all in the space of 24 hours.

So he’s well aware it makes him an asshole, but instead of doing anything, Quentin just goes to sleep.

* * *

Quentin wakes up the next day determined to tell someone about Eliot. It’s at the top of his to-do list, but then he decides against texting anyone because the news will be more appropriate in person, and then when he sees Alice before class there’s no time, and then Quentin needs some time during his lunch break to come to grips with mortality and doesn’t feel prepared to have the conversation, and then he’s in an empty classroom with the entire gang and he feels too exposed, and then he’s walking home and he didn’t tell anyone at all. 

Quentin keeps coming back to the fact that Eliot didn’t kill him and didn’t try to bite him. Even though he practices the speech in his head a thousand times - “Hey Julia, remember Eliot Waugh from school? Vampire, I know, crazy right? Could you stab him, please?” - his brain cycles back to the interaction, the look in his eyes, his almost-human visage, and Quentin can’t bring himself to share. 

He’s under no illusions that Eliot is safe, but, right now, he doesn’t seem like an imminent threat. 

Which Quentin realizes may have been a mistake when suddenly it’s nighttime, he’s walking home alone, and comes across Eliot again.

Quentin thinks he sees Eliot before he sees him, but he’s not so sure. Eliot is - there’s no other word for it -  _ displaying _ himself on top of a mausoleum close to the cemetery's entrance. There’s a smaller woman pressed against him, and they’re lounging like they don’t have a care in the world, cigarette dangling between loose fingers. For being dead, Eliot looks surprisingly lively. When Quentin thinks about what he would have had to do to look like this, the people he must have fed on to stay alive, he feels sick.

Quentin hopes he can just walk past without them noticing, but he’s spared no such luck.

“Come here often?” Eliot calls to him.

Quentin debates making a run for it, but decides to settle for pausing at the entrance, enough feet back from the lounging duo. It means he has to yell a bit to be heard, but it also means he hopes he can make a quick escape if Eliot actually tries something this time. 

Quentin clutches his bag close and looks at Eliot with exasperation, and maybe a little bit of awe comes through, too. “I mean, kind of? You’re on my usual route, so you’re kind of on my turf.”

“Hey, little human,” the woman speaks with a playful drawl to her voice, almost hypnotic. “Cemeteries are traditionally vampire domain. You may be here for a moment, but we’re here forever. Get used to it.”

“Okay…” Quentin has no idea what to say to that. He feels like he’s being played with, and it’s lighting up excitement in his core that he hasn’t felt in awhile, but it’s also bringing fear right to the forefront.

“He’s not that cute,” the woman tells Eliot, and she definitely says it loud enough so that Quentin can hear too. 

“Now, now, Margo,” Eliot shushes, but there’s only fondness in his tone. Which is weird for vampires. In Quentin’s experience, vampires don’t have nice bonds with each other: there’s always a hierarchy, a minion, a master, some kind of something ominous going on. Eliot and Margo don’t speak to each other like that. 

Margo sits up from her sprawl, and hops down. Quentin takes a step backwards at the change, wanting to keep his distance but also wanting to know what the hell is going on with these weirdo vampires.

“Hey, Quentin, are you a vampire groupie by any chance?” Margo asks bluntly.

“No,” Quentin says quickly, and he’s not sure if he could have played it more coy to enhance his chances of ending this encounter alive, but he does not want this strange vampire thinking he’s up for anything. 

“Shame,” she says.

Quentin may be curious, but he’s also had enough. They’re still far enough away, and he thinks if he makes a break for it now, there’s a chance he can make it home alive. For all their talk, this neighborhood is his home turf, so he thinks he could probably take enough shortcuts to do it.

Quentin pivots and makes a break for it, but unfortunately he spent a little too long deliberating, because he only makes it less than a block before Margo is in front of him. She holds out a hand, stopping him dead in his tracks. She looks almost disappointed. 

“What are you doing?” She says as if she’s grossed out by his show of fear.

“Let me go.” Quentin says.

She moves closer, holding a hand up, and he grabs her wrist. He’s no match for her vampire strength, and she slaps his hand back.

She swipes a nail along the side of his neck and it comes away red. Quentin can feel his eyes widening in fear, he’s never been good at hiding it, and he can feel his body lock up. 

Margo brings her finger to her lips. “You taste good.”

“Margo,” Eliot shouts as he runs up behind him, and Quentin can’t turn around for fear of losing track of Margo. She seems like the more immediate threat right now, although Quentin is well aware he has completely lost control of the situation. “Will you stop scaring him.”

“It’s not my fault he’s scared,” Margo replies.

Eliot moves next to Margo, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder and rubbing his thumb along her collarbone. “Could I have some alone time with him?”

Margo looks critically at Quentin, eyeing him up and down. Between the blood and the judgment, Quentin feels like a prized pig being sized up for auction. 

“I’ll go get us something to eat,” Margo allows. She leans up to kiss Eliot on the cheek, then heads off down the sidewalk away from them. Even though Quentin is still standing next to a vampire, he feels himself relax.

“There’s a park like two blocks down, want to get away from the graveyard?” Eliot asks.

Quentin knows he should say no, but he also has no idea how Eliot would respond to that. And at least he’s also familiar with said park, so it’s not territory where he’d completely lose his ground. It’s also a bit closer to Julia’s usual patrol, so there’s a better chance of Quentin getting rescued. “Sure.”

They walk together, and Quentin has about two minutes to think about the fact that he has no idea what’s going on anymore. Eliot is the weirdest vampire Quentin’s ever met and Quentin has no idea whether he should be feeling as safe as he does or if he should be more scared than he’s ever been. If this is all a ploy to get him to let his guard down so he can get murdered, Quentin’s going to be a little pissed.

As they get to the park, Eliot asks, “So, what are you, some kind of vampire hunter?” Eliot manages to make it sound disdainful, even though Quentin would assume the answer is very important for Eliot’s continued well-being. 

“Sure.”

“Oh c’mon, none of that one word answer bullshit. Who else am I gonna tell? I want to know how little Q Coldwater turned himself into a big bad demon hunter.”

“I mean-” Quentin stops himself. The problem is that he wants to talk to Eliot, wants to get swept up in his orbit like they’re just two old friends. And that desire is clouding his reasoning, making him feel like whatever he wants must be bad so he should just stop now before he does something he regrets.

“Two words, I’ll take that as an improvement.” Eliot acknowledges.

“Why do you want to know?” Quentin says, drawing it out to give himself time to think, dammit.

“I’m curious.” Quentin doesn’t remember Eliot looking like this much of a cat in high school. 

“This is stupid,” Quentin mutters half to himself. Whatever, okay he’s allowed to talk to someone. He doesn’t feel like he’s in immediate danger anymore, and he likes Eliot. He feels drawn to him, and as long as he keeps a hand on holy water and the other on a stake, there’s not too much that Eliot can do to him. 

Although, Quentin thinks he should probably start wearing a cross again.

“Okay, so I guess you could maybe say I’m a vampire hunter. But it’s not like it’s my job or anything,” Quentin pushes out in a rush.

A slow smile spreads across Eliot’s face: scary and genuine. There seems to be real interest in his eyes. Eliot settles himself onto a bench, patting the seat next to him. Quentin settles himself on the very far end of the bench to put at least a few feet between them. He’s down for a chat, not to get murdered.

“So it’s an extracurricular?” Eliot prompts. Quentin chuckles with how close to the truth it actually is, looking away. They do have an official college club to make research sessions easier - the  _ Ancient Sumerian Culture Club _ . They have a budget and everything - which Quentin submits as treasurer - although it more often gets used for pizza and wooden pegs than flyers. 

“More like a duty. Or well, not exactly my duty.” Quentin furrows his brows. “Do you remember Julia?”

“I think so? Your friend, really tiny…?”

“Yeah, so, um, Julia is the slayer.”

Quentin looks back at Eliot to take in his reaction to the news. Eliot’s eyes widen, his hands tightening for a second on the bench beneath him. Something like pride coils up in Quentin. 

“Huh,” Eliot finally says.

Eliot opens and closes his mouth a few times, looking for more words, but they don’t quite come. 

“Yeah, it’s pretty wild.”

Eliot opens his mouth again, and coherent sounds eventually make their way out of it. “I’m torn between feeling like I'm two degrees away from knowing a celebrity and knowing that that celebrity has the power and drive to kill me.”

“Yeah, it’s a lot to process. She was called a long time ago though, so I’m used to it. And she’s really good at her job.” Quentin says the last part as clearly as he can. Eliot should know that if he tries anything, Julia will definitely kill him.

“Was it-” Eliot seems to swallow before continuing, “Do you know if she was called before or after- well, you know.”

Quentin looks at Eliot, really looks at him. This is the first time that he truly seems like the Eliot he used to know. “It was a couple months after you died.”

“Weird.” Eliot says.

“None of us had any clue what happened to you.”

“Good.” Eliot pulls himself back up and crosses his legs, like he’s settling his body into a mask that his face hasn’t quite donned yet. “I’m sure there are countless conspiracy theories surrounding my death. Mystery, scandal, the works.”

“I think there was at least one person who thought it was aliens.”

“Ugh, how cliche.”

“Most of us just accepted the line about it being an accident,” Quentin says. 

Eliot sits still as death next to him, staring out into the dark park.

“What happened?” Quentin can’t help himself but ask.

“I assumed that would be obvious.” Eliot half-smirks. 

“I know you’re a vampire, but like, what happened, you know?”

“Margo turned me, and we’ve been exploring the world ever since. Growing up, I never thought I’d even see Europe, let alone drink along the Seine or go to clubs in Berlin. The past few years have been very good to me.”

Quentin was more curious about the actual dying-and-becoming-a-vampire part of the story, but he doesn’t want to push Eliot to talk about something he maybe doesn’t want to: out of kindness or fear, Quentin doesn’t even know anymore. 

“Was that where you got the new digs? Paris or Berlin?”

Quentin can tell it was the wrong thing to say immediately. Eliot’s face pinches closed and then he looks away. Quentin thinks maybe Eliot doesn’t like to be reminded that he hasn’t always looked like this.

“No.” Eliot says shortly.

“Okay, um…” Quentin’s fear turns into anxiety at the awkward moment. It feels stupid to care about a social faux paus when he’s sitting next to a literal demon, but his nervous system has never made the most sense. 

“Are you going to kill me?” Quentin’s self-preservation instincts have also never made the most sense.

“What? No.” Eliot turns back to him in confusion.

“Just checking.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Eliot asks, and there’s a hint of confidence in his posture and voice that makes Quentin feel like maybe he’s being mocked.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Okay, well, be sure to let me know when you do.” Eliot laughs. 

Eliot turns himself more fully on the bench to stare at him. A shiver runs down Quentin’s spine. Quentin blames it on the night air. 

“I’m not evil,” Eliot says with too much intensity. Quentin doesn’t know if he believes that. “I don’t have some evil plan here. Trust me, world domination is not possible and not on the agenda. Take it from me, if you try to take over a small Ukrainian village, the peasants will revolt.” Eliot leans forward just a little bit into his space. “I recognized you, and thought maybe we could talk.” 

“So here we are, talking.”

“Yeah.”

The moment hangs between them, and Quentin is enthralled. If Eliot were human, this swell of emotion inside him would be so easy, he’d know exactly what to do with it. As it stands, Eliot is a soulless vampire, and Quentin can’t lean in. He can accept that Eliot isn’t going to murder him, maybe isn’t even going to run off and murder anyone else, but he can’t let himself get swept too far into his orbit. 

“I have to go,” Quentin says, hoping Eliot stays true to the image he’s presented so far and just lets him leave, hoping he’s as not-evil as he says he is.

“Goodnight, Quentin.” Eliot nods his head. Quentin gets up, and takes a final look at Eliot sitting debonairly on the bench. His pale skin glows in the preternatural light of the streetlamps.

Quentin goes home, and Eliot lets him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! If you're anything like me, you want some biting in your vampire fic, and this chapter has the start of that. Enjoy!

Quentin is a mess of confusion, and he needs answers. He needs to talk to Dean Fogg.

The large clock in Dean Fogg’s office tics a slow heartbeat, and Quentin shuffles his feet against the old carpeting. Dean Fogg sits primly on the other side of the desk, rearranging his watcher journals, his demon anthologies, and takes a sip of his coffee, a performance which means Quentin is forced to wait anxiously to have a conversation he doesn’t particularly want to be having.

“Ah,” Dean Fogg says as he drags the coffee mug back from his lips. “For all this school cuts corners on everything else, they do not skimp on the coffee.”

Quentin watches him as he sets the mug down and looks at him intently.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your devoted company,” Fogg states. 

“I have a demon-related question, and well, watcher.” Quentin can feel himself point at Fogg in explanation even though obviously he knows he’s a watcher. “Well, you know,” Quentin trails off. This all sounded better in his head. 

Dean Fogg slowly raises his eyebrows. Even though Quentin’s known him for years, there’s something about being in his office that makes him feel like he’s back in high school.

“Not looking to summon anything, I hope?” 

Quentin shakes his head, but Fogg continues, “Because I know I removed those particular books from the library at our little club gatherings, and I would hope you haven’t gone snooping.”

“No, uh-” Quentin takes a breath and decides to get back on track. “No, I have a question about vampires, and uh- morality, I guess?”

Dean Fogg sighs. “Thankfully, I usually forget that you are majoring in philosophy. What in particular do you need to talk about?”

Quentin decides to move past that. He’s pretty sure somewhere, deep down, Fogg has a little bit of fondness for him, but he’s not willing to hedge his bets. “Have there ever been vampires who were, for lack of a more accurate term, good? Anyone who didn’t kill, or who used a different blood source?”

Dean Fogg considers for a moment. “Let me be clear. On the whole, vampires are basic creatures. They trick, kidnap, and feed on humans and use their blood to stay alive. Even though it is in their nature, even though it is the only thing that will keep them alive, I would call that evil. I myself have never had the misfortune to take a philosophy course, but I am sure of that.”

“Right, but are there exceptions? Even exceptions that prove the rule? Any vampires that have tried to live differently?”

“There have been stories, yes. In recent decades the watcher journals have gotten less prolific, but there have been stories of vampires abstaining from blood. Souled vampires.”

“Souled vampires?”

“Yes,” Dean Fogg says slowly. “This is all to satisfy a moral hypothetical, correct?”

“Yes,” Quentin says quickly.

“There have been souled vampires. Although I don’t know if it is morally just to doom a human soul to share a body with a demon, but it has been done, and for the most part has stopped a vampire from killing.”

Quentin sits back, letting the new knowledge wash over him. Could Eliot and Margo have souls? Is that why Eliot hasn’t killed him? And if he does, is it really like sharing your body with a demon who has the urge to kill all the humans around you? It sounds like hell.

“Watchers, especially turn of the century watchers, are a particularly verbose and pontificating bunch. If you’d like to delve deeper into vampire morality, there are plenty of journals and articles written on the subject. I would suggest looking there, as my font of interest has run dry.”

“Cool, thanks, I will.” Quentin gathers his things and stands up.

“And Quentin?”

“Yeah?”

Dean Fogg’s eyes soften. “Please don’t get too in your head about this. We do the work we do because vampires kill people. It is as simple as that.”

Quentin nods and ducks out. 

* * *

Quentin holes himself up in the library, watcher journals spread around him. In his experience, any time they have to do demonic research, they never have to be too stealthy about it - most students tend to just assume historical looking documents with the word  _ vampire _ plastered all over them are all fiction or superstition. 

In his searching, Quentin sees vague mention of souled vampires. The details are sparse, but it’s possible, and that feels like enough to give him the start of clarity.

Unfortunately, he does find detailed descriptions of something else: Margo. 

From the journal of  Sir John William Chambers :

> _ 6 June 1780 _
> 
> _ The dreaded beast has come again. She has stolen my darling wife, and I am afraid I may be next. To my children, I love you, and to my council, my deepest apologies. _
> 
> _ The vampire Margo has taken from me that which I hold most dear, and for this I must attempt revenge. _
> 
> _ May God have mercy on my soul. _

From the journal of  Frank Cooley:

> _ 9 September 1889 _
> 
> _ The men go off to the mines and come back changed, weaker. It took me many weeks to realize some were going missing as at first the disappearances seemed to be coin or harlequin caused.  _
> 
> _ Miss Hanson says it is a demon, but I am not so sure. The hysterics of women can often blind reasonable men, so I must keep my training in mind. There is something underfoot, but I am unsure if it is demon or man as there are many who wish to take advantage of the opportunities in the West, not all of them with noble intentions.  _
> 
> _ All to say, I will keep my eyes open. _
> 
> _ 12 September 1889 _
> 
> _ It is Miss Margo Hanson. A demon has come to Fort Clairmont in the shape of a woman. She has bedeviled us all, I am ashamed. I must take flight before more of us are dead.  _

Journal after journal, passage after passage, over the course of at least two-hundred years, Margo pops up. Quentin’s eyes get tired before he can get through it all, but Margo’s name comes up way too often for him to put it aside as mere coincidence. Sometimes gruesome, sometimes mysterious, sometimes banal, Margo has made her mark on the Watcher’s Council. Subtle enough that no one- as far as Quentin knows - is launching a hunt against her, but definitely there.

And she’s definitely killing.

Quentin rubs his eyes. He supposes it’s possible that she has a soul, but given what he just read, that soul would have to have happened sometime after her last recorded kill in the 90s. It’s certainly possible, but it’s not feeling very likely. 

No, Quentin has to go into this with the assumption that Margo and Eliot are soulless. Soulless, but at least Eliot seems willing to play by rules if what he’s seen is accurate. Which means, if Quentin wants to keep Eliot alive and away from Julia, then Quentin needs to make sure they don’t feed.

* * *

Turns out trying to find one vampire in particular in a town with a dozen cemeteries is difficult. Who would have thought.

When he doesn’t see Eliot that same night, Quentin tries to go on about his life normally, but he can feel anxiety growing. Anytime he talks to Julia, the knowledge that he knows about a vampire in their town creeps out of his subconscious. He knows he’s acting weird, but what can he do. 

The longer he goes without seeing Eliot, the greater the chance that one of these nights, Eliot’s going to run into Julia and turn to dust. And Quentin may not even know unless Julia happens to recognize him before she stakes him. 

A few nights later, Quentin is walking by a particularly snazzy tomb when he hears a jovial, “Quentin!”

Quentin turns, and sees none other than Eliot leaning against the doorframe of the tomb. An unbidden toothy smile lights up his face to match Eliot’s. “Hey.”

“What have you been up to?”

“Saving townsfolk, fighting the forces of darkness. The usual.”

“Very macho.”

“And you?”

“Creeping, crawling, seducing fair maidens into the darkness. You know, the usual.” One side of Eliot’s mouth tips up before the other when he smiles, and Quentin can feel his heart race as he notices. 

Eliot is just looking at him, but Quentin feels like he has a spotlight on him. With everything he’s been worrying about, he somehow forgot about the tinge of excitement he gets when talking to him.

“Do you want to come inside?”

Quentin wants to say yes, but he hesitates. If he goes into Eliot’s tomb and he’s wrong about him, then there’s a high likelihood that he never steps out. 

“I know you don’t technically need an invitation to enter, but I figured it was the polite thing to do,” Eliot continues over Quentin’s silence.

With the plan Quentin’s been thinking up, he thinks that maybe it’s a little too late to get cautious now. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Okay.”

Eliot leads him inside, and Quentin is struck by how clean everything is for a tomb. There are no spider webs, no dust, no moss creeping between bricks. It’s clean, but also bare, and Quentin can’t imagine Eliot, fabulous and decadent Eliot, sleeping on a hard coffin.

“Our rooms are downstairs,” Eliot explains, pulling up a door and gesturing to a ladder below. With a final goodbye to his good sense, they descend into the belly of the beast.

In Eliot’s bedroom, there’s a charge between them that either wasn’t there before, or Quentin just didn’t notice because of the whole fear thing. But now, he’s highly aware of how intimate it feels to stand in Eliot’s dimly lit bedroom.

But Quentin isn’t here for that. Eliot looks at him hungrily, but Quentin has a request - no, a demand - that he needs to make, and he will not get sidetracked.

“Do you have a soul?” Quentin blurts out.

“I don’t think so?” Eliot’s brows furrow. Quentin prepared himself for that answer, but it still sucks to hear, and it’s going to make this whole thing harder.

“Okay.” Quentin nods to himself, starting to pace the room. Here goes nothing. “If you’re going to stay in town, you can’t keep biting people. You and Margo need to find a different blood supply, because hurting people is no longer an option.” Quentin stops his fidgeting and keeps his back straight and his shoulders back, trying to project the image of a strong vampire hunter. 

Eliot’s lip curls up in disgust. “Really?”

“Yes, no biting. Even  _ consensual _ ,” Quentin air-quotes, “biting.”

“Well, that’s no fun. You’re trying to curb my nature, our nature. That’s like telling a dog it’s not allowed to eat meat, or a chicken not to lay eggs.”

“If it’s so much a part of your nature, then you’re not safe and the whole deal is off.”

Eliot steps closer, close enough that Quentin can feel the lack of heat that his body gives off. 

“Oh, so we’re negotiating now? I don’t think you’re in a position to negotiate for the whole town.”

“I’m negotiating for Julia, and yes, she does run this town. She won’t let you stay here if you’re a threat.” 

Eliot pulls out a cigarette, but plays it along his fingers instead of bringing it to his lips. 

“If you don’t want us to feed, we’ll need a different source.” Eliot lifts his eyes to meet Quentin’s and raises his brows like he’s just proposed something specific.

Quentin raises his brows right back in question. Of course he’ll need a different source, that’s what this whole conversation has been about.

Eliot brings the cigarette to his lips and lights it, takes a quick drag and steps away. “I want to feed from you.”

“Hey now, what, that’s not what I-“ Quentin trips over his words, too startled to compose a full sentence of objection.

Eliot nods purposefully. “It’s the only way.” 

“That is definitely not true. There are plenty of butchers in this town.”

“Okay, fine, it’s not the  _ only _ way, but it is the way that keeps me happiest, the most motivated to stick to this plan of yours.”

Quentin stares at Eliot. Eliot stares back, cigarette forgotten. “I don’t want to kill you.”

Eliot shrugs. “I don’t want to die.”

Eliot half-bows, his hands spreading wide. He says, “The choice is yours.”

Quentin folds his hands over his chest, then immediately unfolds. He’s just not sure. He needs to know that Margo and Eliot aren’t off killing people, and he doesn’t want to kill them, doesn’t want to pit Julia against an old classmate and an ancient vampire. He doesn’t mind the biting or threat-to-his-life parts of the proposed plan so much, but he promised Julia he wouldn’t needlessly put himself in danger. Letting a vampire bite him seems like needless danger.

“Okay, you need this easier?” Eliot says with an airy tone. “How about I kill your friends and family if you don’t let me drink from you?”

Quentin’s stomach drops and he’s sure he looks horrified. Quentin can’t believe he ever thought Eliot might have a soul. 

Eliot starts laughing. “I’m joking, Q. I wouldn’t do that.”

Quentin swallows, knows he can’t take the risk that he wasn’t just toying with him. 

Quentin forces himself to keep his arms firmly planted at his sides, no fidgeting. “If you drink from me, you need to supplement with pig’s blood.”

Eliot’s face fills up with delight at the give. “Yeah, fine, whatever.”

“Can you promise me that Margo will go along with this, too? That she won’t bite anyone?”

Eliot shrugs. “Don’t worry about Margo, that’ll be fine.”

And Quentin feels like maybe he should have doubts about that, but he’s seen what they’re like together, how much affection they seem to have. He thinks he can probably bet on Eliot being able to influence Margo to go along with this.

“And you can only drink from me every eight weeks.”

“The fuck? That’s nothing.”

Quentin crosses his arms. “It’s government recommended.”

“I’m not the fucking Red Cross. Every week, get used to it,” Eliot says. 

“I can’t just get used to it, Eliot, that’s not how bodies work. Four weeks?”

“Two weeks,” Eliot rushes out. 

“My body can’t handle that.”

Eliot gives him a sly smile. “I promise I won’t drink too much.”

“That...does not sound very convincing.”

“C’mon, let me drink from you every week and I’ll make it even less.”

Quentin thinks about it. If Eliot is here with him then he’s not somewhere else possibly murdering or doing demon stuff. Or getting caught by his friends.

“Once a week but you only get, like, a little bit. We’re talking tablespoons not pints, got it?”

Eliot’s eyes flash and a lascivious grin crosses his face. “Deal.”

Quentin holds out his hand, intending to shake on it.

“Why don’t we drink on it, instead?”

Quentin’s eyes widen at the suggestion, and he looks around the room at the frankly unhygienic surroundings. It almost feels wrong to be considering someone taking blood from his body in a place that looks nothing like a hospital or doctor’s office and everything like a decadent hole in the ground. He didn’t really prepare for this, emotionally or supplies-wise.

“I mean- Is it sterile?”

Eliot stares at him blankly.

“I don’t know where your fangs have been,” Quentin says. 

“I have literally never had a problem before.”

“Were you paying attention?” Quentin presses. Eliot looks affronted. “Because sometimes staph infections can be silent until suddenly you’re very sick and very dead. And I would-”

“I have bitten partners who I’ve kept around afterwards, and they didn’t get sick.”

Something about the way Eliot says  _ partners  _ makes him sound so human, and Quentin is a little taken aback. He can’t possibly have had any humans around who he cared about, that’s just not what vampires do. 

“I guess I can settle for just some neosporin and a bandage,” Quentin mutters.

“Quentin, what was the alternative?” Eliot implores, flabbergasted. “Rubbing alcohol on my fangs?”

Quentin probably looks too interested in that solution, and Eliot moves swiftly on.

Eliot steps into his space, and Quentin flinches back. Eliot stills, hand raised mid gesture. He steps forward again, slower, and Quentin forces himself to stay put as Eliot traces a light finger down Quentin’s neck. He shivers, surprised by how good the contact feels. 

Eliot softly asks, “Have you ever thought about being bitten?”

Of course he has. When he found out vampires were real, he thought of every pop culture reference to them he had ever heard of and systematically went through each, wondering which one they’d be most like. Would they be erotic monsters like  _ Dracula _ ? Sparkly like  _ Twilight _ ? Flaccid but sexual and existential like  _ Interview with a Vampire _ ? He got a little caught up in the fantasy of it, wondering what it would feel like to actually have a real, live vampire sucking blood from him.

But then the bodies started piling up and he saw with his own eyes what vampires could do. And suddenly, the fantasy wasn’t so vivid. 

“No,” Quentin says. 

“I’ve heard it feels good.”

“Did you hear that through the vampire gossip chain, or from these supposed partners of yours?”

Eliot looks at him quizzically. “I wasn’t lying about that.”

“I didn’t think you were.” Quentin had.

Eliot’s teasing finger turns into a hand clutching his shoulder. It should scare him, trap him, but for some reason it makes him feel safe. 

“It’s going to feel good, I promise.”

Quentin lets out a nervous laugh. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Eliot’s hand clutches tighter, almost massaging his shoulder muscle. Quentin tracks his gaze which is sliding over his carotid. It’s weird. And exhilerating, and confusing and- fuck it, okay, Quentin’s scared and turned on at the same time, and it’s a second by second flip-flop of which emotion is reigning supreme.

Quentin really doesn’t want Julia to know about any of this.

“Don’t bite my neck.” It would be difficult to hide a bite on his neck, no matter how small, from his friends. And it feels like a test, like if Eliot acquiesces to Quentin’s request, then maybe he is a man - vampire - of integrity and will be able to keep up his end of the bargain. 

Eliot pats his neck sadly, saying goodbye. “Very well. Where do you want me?”

“I guess, um, wrist wouldn’t be too bad.”

Eliot looks at him with a strange amount of fondness - so much that Quentin doesn’t know how to handle it. Eliot says, “Wrist will do just fine.”

Eliot takes him by the hand, his thumb playing lightly over his wrist, and leads him over to his bed.

“Um,” Quentin mumbles. Doing this on a bed feels way too intimate.

“Relax, I just want to sit down.” Eliot primly sits on the edge of the bed, still holding Quentin’s hand and staring up at him intensely. He doesn’t have to crane his neck very far with their height difference, but it’s just enough to make Quentin feel like he might have a sliver of control in this. “Unless-” Quentin thinks Eliot’s about to suggest some lascivious activity, or make a joke, but Eliot continues, “Do you get lightheaded around blood?”

And Quentin is a little stunned. It’s maybe the first time Eliot has shown genuine concern for his well-being throughout this whole mess of a situation they’re in. 

“Prefer your victims conscious?” Quentin attempts to joke. The concern that was in Eliot’s eyes is pushed back behind a wall.

“Exactly, we can’t have you passing out before the fun part,” Eliot says.

“No, I’m okay. Just do it.”

Eliot takes his wrist between them and thumbs his pulse, pressing down with a light pressure to feel out the artery. He tugs Quentin, and suddenly he’s just that little bit closer so that he’s standing between Eliot’s spread thighs. If he thought not being on the bed would make this less intimate, he was wrong.

At the press of a gentle kiss against his wrist, Quentin shivers. It’s embarrassing. It feels really embarrassing to be swept up in whatever game Eliot is playing with him and be so affected. 

Eliot pauses for a moment, then presses against his wrist lightly with teeth. His non-human teeth. He must have shifted to his vampire face without Quentin seeing, maybe not wanting him to see. He’s struck with a weird longing and curiosity to see what Eliot looks like in full monstrosity. He’s never seen it before.

After one more press of his teeth in warning, Eliot bites down.

It hurts. Of course it hurts. The sting is sharp and bright, but only marginally more painful than getting his blood drawn at the doctor’s office. What makes it so intense is Eliot clamping his mouth down around the wound and sucking. Or not sucking, just swallowing? It’s like he’s letting Quentin’s body do all the work to pump his blood out through his wrist and into Eliot’s mouth, and Eliot is just receiving. 

Quentin looks down and sees Eliot’s dark curls bent over his wrist, keeping him in place while he drinks. Quentin lets out a small gasp at the sight.

Eliot moves a hand around Quentin’s back and pulls him in closer, holds him steady while he feeds. The long swallows are intermittent with presses of his tongue against his skin, like he’s trying to staunch the flow of blood bit by bit, not adding enough pressure to close the wound, but enough to keep his blood from escaping for moments at a time. Eliot is savoring this.

“Eliot,” Quentin says, but it comes out more of a moan.

Eliot continues playing with his wrist, almost exclusively pressing his tongue and mouth to the sensitive wound. No longer drinking, just kissing. Trying to make him feel good, or playing with his food.

It’s that final thought that brings Quentin back to reality, and he says with more force, “Eliot.”

Eliot gives his wrist a final kiss, then pulls back. Looking up at Quentin, his brows have already shifted back to their human visage.

Quentin wraps a tight hand around his wrist to add pressure. 

“Are you alright?” Eliot asks, blood staining his lips.

Quentin swallows. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Eliot’s hand on his back soothes him like a spooked animal, and Quentin flinches backwards and out of Eliot’s touch. 

“I have to go,” Quentin breathes out, eyes wide open.

Eliot looks up at him, awe and confusion and resignation in his eyes. “Okay.”

“I’ll be back, I just- I have to go.”

Quentin bandages his wrist, races home, and tries his best to act like he didn’t just get off on being bitten by a vampire.


	4. Chapter 4

Their arrangement goes on for weeks, and Quentin can feel himself becoming more and more comfortable with being a blood bag for a vampire. Under the pomp and circumstance of all things Eliot, Quentin actually finds him intriguing and careful and affectionate and altogether fascinating. 

The best part is that it seems to be working. Julia hasn’t mentioned running into Margo or Eliot on her patrols, and she’s even been off his back about playing hero since more of his time has been spent in Margo and Eliot’s tomb than wandering around graveyards. 

It would all be perfect if it weren’t for the lying. 

The truth weighs on Quentin’s conscience, but, at this point, he’s in too deep to casually bring the rest of the gang into it. He’s not even sure he has a sound moral argument anymore for doing what he’s doing: he just likes Eliot and doesn’t want him killing people or dead. As long as everyone stays alive, the plan is working. 

One day in late October, Quentin finds himself back in Eliot’s room for their weekly feeding. The air outside is developing a chill, but the underground rooms that Margo and Eliot keep feel comfortable and warm. Quentin has no idea how they’re heating the place, and he wonders if they’re only doing it for his benefit. 

They sit on the bed close to each other. Eliot makes them drinks, and Quentin can’t help gesticulating and sloshing a little over the side as he describes a recent paper he’s putting off writing. Their conversation segues into Eliot telling a story about a college town in California he tried to rule socially without actually enrolling at the school, a feat that, at least according to Eliot, took no time at all. 

Quentin is dazzled, quietly sipping his drink, as he listens to Eliot talk. For someone so dead and dangerous, he comes alive when he’s in his element. Quentin is blown away. 

Quentin doesn’t want to ruin the mood, but there’s been something bugging him these last few weeks. Eliot’s been shifty about how he actually became a vampire, the whole dying process with Margo, and Quentin balks now about how anyone could have possibly seen this beautiful person and wanted to kill him. 

“What happened to you?” Quentin blurts out.

Eliot stops mid sentence, eyes still alight with frivolity from his story. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Coldwater? A question from the class?”

“Sorry, just, we’ve talked a little bit about it before, but how did you actually die?”

Eliot laughs. “You make it sound so horrific, like I have some trauma to spill my guts about.”

“You died. That feels pretty traumatic.”

“Yes, I suppose there is that.” The energy in the room turns reflective, Eliot letting go of the last of his joking tone. Quentin would feel bad, except that it feels like maybe for once he can get a straight answer out of Eliot. 

Eliot looks wistful. “Margo saved me.”

Quentin’s stomach drops with a stone-weight. Quentin counters, “She turned you into a vampire.”

“Yes,” Eliot says fiercely. “When I was human, I had no idea who or what I was supposed to be. All I knew was that I needed to get out. Out from under my father, out of this town, out of the person I was. “ Eliot breathes, even though he doesn’t need to, and it feels like a parody of who he used to be. “Margo is the first person who saw me, really saw me. Saw who I was underneath all the bullshit and wanted to see what I could become.”

Quentin thinks he can understand that, wanting to be someone else so badly that you would do anything just to be different, or, better yet, to have someone tell you who you were meant to be all along. It reminds him of Julia being called, that initial rush of  _ oh, this is what all the suffering was for, this is when my story starts _ . But it never works out that cleanly.

Quentin says, “Did you ever give anyone a chance before Margo? To see you?”

“What?”

“I don’t mean- just- remember, I knew you, in high school. You always seemed a mile away.”

Eliot looks offended.

Quentin continues on, trying to explain his thoughts. “I’m trying to say that I spent a lot of my teen years feeling like complete and utter shit, and thinking  _ why doesn’t anybody see? Why won’t anybody just ask me if I’m okay? _ And then I ended up in a really dark place, and I scared a lot of people I love, and, after, I learned that sometimes I needed to be the one to reach out if I was hurting. People aren’t mind readers.”

Eliot opens his mouth to correct-

“I know some demons are mind-readers, but people  _ on the whole  _ are not mind readers.”

They sit quietly.

Eliot asks, “Are you okay?”

Quentin’s not sure if Eliot understood the point of his speech. His instinct is to make a joke or brush it off, but he considers. “I’m not sure. No offense, but you’re adding a lot of stress to my already stressful life.”

“I’m not sorry about that.”

Quentin rolls his eyes.

“Or, I guess I’m sorry it’s stressful, but I’d rather be in your life than out of it.”

Quentin thinks he can understand that. He says, “How about you? You okay?”

“Yeah. Just peachy.”

Quentin tilts his head.

“What? Just because I’m a vampire I have to be tortured?”

“I mean, you could try for a little remorse.” It comes out quieter than Quentin expects. 

“I don’t feel remorseful. Becoming a vampire is the best thing that ever happened to me. Sure, maybe I would have gotten here eventually as a human, but it feels really good to skip the bullshit and jump right to traveling the world with my soulmate and doing whatever the fuck I want. It always hurts to become, why should I worry because my version had a little more trauma to it.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t traumatic.”

Eliot purses his lips. “I did, didn’t I.”

Quentin looks down at his hands and tries to imagine what it would be like to be turned into a vampire at the age of eighteen by someone as cool and deadly as Margo. He’s trying to understand Eliot, but he knows that if he were in his shoes, Quentin wouldn’t welcome the change the way Eliot has. “Sorry, it just sounds shitty.”

Eliot nods. “Parts of it are shitty, but that doesn’t mean I have to feel bad about it.”

The mood in the room feels precarious, but there’s something else on his mind that he can’t quite understand.

“You and Margo. Are you two, like, together?”

“She’s my sire.” Eliot says it like that should be enough to answer the question.

Eliot looks over but Quentin stares blankly back. 

“Don’t your little watcher books explain any of this?”

“Most of them are a little more concerned with the killing and stopping of mayhem than vampire communal dynamics.”

Eliot scoffs. “Figures.”

The urge feels wild and uncalled for, but Quentin is struck by the desire to reach out to hold Eliot’s hand through this conversation.

Eliot explains, “It’s intense, and complicated, like she’s my teacher but we’re also the same. She’s my best friend. I don’t know if it’s like that for all sires, but it’s like that for us.”

“We’re not  _ exclusive, _ ” Eliot says the word with disdain. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

“Oh, um, thank you, but no I wasn’t.”

“I’m completely free to seduce you if I choose to.”

A flush rises, unbidden, to Quentin’s face. “Is that what this is?”

“No, I just love hanging out with vampire hunters who want to kill me.”

The reminder of what they are makes discomfort grow over the anxious excitement in Quentin’s belly. 

Eliot looks over at him, and a single curl of his hair has gotten loose from its slicked back place. Quentin wants to push it back. “I do like you, you know,” Eliot says. 

“Cool, um, thanks.”

“You’re not just a blood bag to me,” Eliot assures. 

It feels like he’s trying to be sweet, but that kind of makes Quentin feel like maybe he is just a blood bag to Eliot. 

“I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable.”

Quentin lets out a nervous laugh. “I thought you enjoyed making people uncomfortable, throwing them off guard, going in for the kill.”

“I’m trying to be sincere.”

“You’re not doing a very good job at it.”

“Obviously.” Eliot chuckles, and Quentin matches him. 

“As much as I appreciate the drink,” Quentin lifts his up in acknowledgement. “Do you want to...? Should we, you know, get to it?”

Eliot looks at him in confusion for a moment, and then it’s like Quentin can see the stoic mask rise up over Eliot’s face: mouth fading into nothing first, then eyes going colder, escaping far away. “Yeah, lets get on with it.”

He shouldn’t, but Quentin feels guilty for pushing that wall back up.

Quentin sets his drink down, and rolls up his sleeves. Eliot takes a steadying swallow of his own drink and thumps it down on the bedside table. Quentin steadies himself with his other arm on the bed, so close to Eliot’s body but not touching, and offers up his left arm in absolution.

He wants to say something, anything, but he can’t, he doesn’t know what the right thing to say is. He wants to push Eliot, push him to admit some desire for humanity that maybe Quentin is only wishing were there.

Quentin likes him and wants to help, but this arrangement has an expiration date if Eliot doesn’t feel any guilt for hurting people as a vampire.

Instead, he keeps his mouth shut, words dying in the back of his mouth before they have a chance to fully form.

Eliot grasps Quentin’s arm and pulls it closer. It feels different from previous times: less reverent, more efficient. The bite comes fast without the usual preamble of sensitivity.

“Ah,” Quentin hisses as Eliot’s fangs slide into him, game-face hidden against his arm as usual. The pain is brief.

Eliot latches on and takes a long forceful pull.

It feels like being punched in the gut. Or like stroking himself to hardness too quickly. Quentin’s eyes close of their own accord and he can’t help the guileless whine that sounds quietly in the back of his throat as Eliot takes hard pulls from his wrist.

“Eliot,” Quentin says. And he doesn’t know what he’s going to say, if he wants it to stop or keep going or go on forever. It feels like so much so quickly.

Eliot takes a slower suck against his wrist, and Quentin’s free arm flies up to clutch to his back. How has Quentin not touched him yet this whole time? Eliot’s back is cool and strong under his hand, and Quentin wonders if he’s going to leave a bruise like Eliot is on him.

He feels drunk on pleasure and sensation.

Quentin realizes that Eliot has stopped sucking the blood from him, is just holding his lips against the wound, willing it to stop bleeding. Quentin opens his eyes and comes back into awareness of what he’s doing.

He tries to subtly shift his right arm back onto the bed without Eliot knowing he’s moving. Quentin takes big gulps of air as he comes down.

His cock is hard.

Quentin would be embarrassed about that, but he’s pretty sure that was Eliot’s intention, so he’s decided to not allow himself to feel that.

“Still okay?” Eliot mumbles against his wrist.

Quentin huffs out, “Yeah.”

“You taste tipsy.”

“What?” Quentin says, dazed.

“I didn’t know your tolerance level. I would have drank more to catch up.”

“How gracious.”’

Quentin has to take a few deep breaths to will his erection down, but it’s slow going when he still has Eliot so close to his wrist. He looks down and he swears he sees a self-satisfied smirk on Eliot’s face.

Eliot gives his wrist a final pat and hands him the neosporin and gauze that has become a constant fixture on Eliot’s worn Victorian dresser. Quentin usually does this part himself, but Eliot takes the gauze after Quentin has dabbed neosporin on the wound and wraps it around his wrist tight. The moment feels just as intimate as having Eliot’s fangs buried in his wrist.

Eliot pats his wrapped wrist. “Good as new.”

“Same time next week?” Quentin asks.

Eliot nods. “Looking forward to it. Make sure not to kill Margo on the way out.”

Quentin laughs and leaves. 

* * *

And with their conversation fresh in his mind, the next day, Quentin starts researching how to give a vampire their soul.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for canon typical depression talk and negative self-talk

Even though Quentin’s had a depression diagnosis for years, somehow it always feels like a surprise every time he starts to have a depressive episode. It’s like he didn’t even realize he was functioning until suddenly he very much isn’t. The low thrum of dissatisfaction and melancholy drifts into tears and lethargy, and he just stops.

His research into souls comes up fruitless, and it feels like a sign that everything he’s trying to do is hopeless. It’s a horrible feeling in his gut that just won’t go away.

He doesn’t go to class because he can get away with it. He doesn’t respond to Julia’s texts because maybe she’ll think he’s sick. He doesn’t call his dad because he can do it next week. He doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t.

What he can’t avoid is Eliot. Because if he avoids Eliot, somebody might get hurt.

So he swallows down ramen, puts on an old pair of jeans, throws his hair into a bun, and makes his way to Eliot’s crypt.

It feels colder than usual, but maybe that’s just him. He hasn’t been eating enough lately - which he knows he should change objectively but still can’t make himself do - and he’s feeling a little light-headed from the brisk walk over here.

He knocks quietly, but doesn’t hear any response, so he lets himself in and looks around at the too-clean mausoleum. The main living quarters are downstairs, but sometimes Eliot is up here to greet him. Right now, it feels like of course Eliot wouldn’t be up here waiting for him. This is purely transactional.

Quentin climbs downstairs, gives a perfunctory knock on Eliot’s door, and lets himself in.

For all the talk about blood and small-scale domination and killing, somehow he’s more surprised by what he sees in that dark room than anything up to this point.

Eliot and Margo curl together on Eliot’s king-sized bed, his hand cradling her head against him. They look peaceful, sweet.

Almost human.

Quentin takes another step into the room, and Eliot opens his eyes.

“Shit,” Eliot says softly but not groggily. Quentin’s not sure how he manages to sound so put together when he literally just woke up. “I didn’t mean to oversleep.”

“It’s fine,” Quentin automatically replies. He’s quiet, not sure how Margo would react to being woken up by a human.

Quentin can’t take his eyes off of them. The mix of silk-soft bedding and patterned sleepwear and collarbones is maybe the most beautiful and scarily erotic thing he’s ever seen. Eliot’s curls fall around his face, and his eyes look almost kind even though Quentin is the one who disturbed him. Quentin feels frozen. His numb heart aches to fly up and out of his throat.

Eliot catches his gaze, catching him out in his obvious staring. He raises his eyebrows, and Quentin doesn’t say anything.

“You can go to Margo’s room, I’ll be there in a second,” Eliot directs. Quentin obeys.

In Margo’s room, Quentin sits on the bed. On another day he might curiously look around or fidget, or more likely worry about Margo killing him for snooping - for all that Eliot loves her, she’s a complete mystery to Quentin - but today he feels slow. His body doesn’t want to move, so he lets himself wait.

Without a knock, Eliot opens the door, his half-open robe showing off his chest-hair, pale skin, light muscles. He looks like maybe he expected Quentin to be doing something scandalous and is disappointed he couldn’t catch him out on it.

“Hey,” Quentin offers.

“Hey,” Eliot replies, eyes honing in like he’s trying to figure Quentin out. “I would apologize for making you see our tableau if I didn’t expect you enjoyed it. I’ll wait for a thank you.”

And usually something like that would make Quentin laugh, he wants to laugh, but he just feels blunted. He manages a small smile. “Thank you so much for oversleeping, Eliot.” It’s not quite the same teasing lilt Eliot’s mastered, but it’ll do.

“You’re welcome.” Eliot leans against Margo’s vanity. “How are classes? How’s patrolling?”

It’s completely innocuous, but for some reason the questions make him want to cry. Classes are fine but monotonous, Julia’s slayer business makes him feel useless, and the slight hint of concern from Eliot makes Quentin feel like his chest might open up and claw its way out of him. “I’m not actually allowed to patrol right now,” Quentin says with bitterness. “There’s a demon on the loose at the moment, and instead of helping, I’ve been forced into the role of pizza delivery boy.”

Eliot puts a hand on his shoulder, and Quentin lets himself feel it, doesn’t jerk away. He can feel the concern radiating off of him, and it makes him hate himself a little bit more that he’s somehow managed to worry an undead creature with his morose bullshit. The concern written on Eliot’s face morphs into resolve, and he pulls him up and close into a hug. Suddenly, Quentin’s surrounded by vampire and Eliot is rubbing his hands up and down his back, and Quentin shouldn’t, but he finds it comforting.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Eliot ventures.

“What, the demon?”

“No, whatever else is happening here.” Eliot’s hands squeeze his back.

“No, no, can we just be quiet?” Quentin doesn’t feel like he has the energy to get into the complicated history of his depression right now.

“Yeah,” Eliot whispers against his neck.

Quentin remembers their deal and how much Eliot wanted to drink from his neck originally. Does he still want that? Quentin wonders if he’d drink too much, if he’d drain him if he punctured his neck. Quentin is tempted to let him try; he’s pretty sure he’d stop, and it seems like a risk he doesn’t particularly care about right now.

But Julia. He’s not supposed to do stupid things that might affect Julia. Quentin compromises on ambivalence: he’s going to let himself relax completely into the moment, but he’s not going to go offering his neck up on a silver platter.

Quentin takes a deep breath in and mumbles, “You smell normal.”

Eliot’s hands still on his back for a moment, and then pick back up their comforting rubbing.

Too slowly, Quentin says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“You mean I don’t smell like a corpse.”

“Well, yeah.” Quentin rubs his nose into Eliot’s chest. “It’s good.”

Quentin thinks he can feel Eliot shake his head above him. 

How can Eliot be evil when this feels so nice?

Eliot presses a kiss to the top of Quentin’s head, and it’s so intimate and affectionate that Quentin doesn’t know what to do with himself. Eliot keeps his face close, pressing it into his hair, and Quentin lets himself sink more fully into Eliot’s embrace. 

_ Are they friends now? _ Quentin wonders. This moment feels charged, but comforting, and Quentin thinks they might be at a point in their arrangement where real friendship is cutting through the blood.

Eliot starts nuzzling lower, moving down to Quentin’s ear, pausing briefly to press a brief kiss there, then moving lower to Quentin’s neck. Quentin gasps. 

He thinks he would really do it, he’d really let him bite his neck if he wanted to. Quentin arches, his neck on display, and it feels good to have Eliot pressed close, but it also feels like his sensations are dulled, like he knows his skin would be tingling if his stupid brain would just let him feel normal for once. 

Eliot could, but he doesn’t bite. Instead, he uses one hand to grab ahold of Quentin’s wrist and pulls it up to his mouth. Quentin feels like a romance novel heroine for a brief, wild moment, when Eliot kisses a line from the crease of his elbow down to his wrist, and then sucks. Quentin can’t help the moan that punches out of him as Eliot sucks with his human teeth and human mouth on his pulse point. 

Quentin is in too deep.

“Your heart’s beating so fast,” Eliot whispers. 

“Yeah,” Quentin absent-mindedly agrees. He can almost feel it pounding in his ears, and he can feel his brain going foggy. 

Eliot sucks on his pulse point again, and then he must shift to his vampire face because his teeth are sinking in to Quentin’s wrist.

It feels good for a second more, but then, because nothing good can stay, Quentin starts to feel faint. The panicky realization that his fast heart rate was probably more due to low blood pressure than being turned on hits him quickly, and then he’s certain he’s about to pass out. 

Eliot is still cradling him, and Quentin thinks he says at a normal volume, “I’m about to pass out,” but it comes out barely louder than a whimper. And then his vision tunnels and he’s barely aware of anything except Eliot holding his slumped body and fangs retreating from his wrist.

When he comes back to awareness, the first thing Quentin feels is confused. The second thing is embarrassed. 

Eliot must have laid him down on Margo’s bed when he passed out, because here he is flat on his back with Eliot looming over him worriedly. 

“I didn’t drink too much, right?” Eliot asks.

“I- uh,” Quentin swallows. “I don’t think so.”

“Good.” Eliot nods. “Shit.”

Quentin breathes against the bed and lets his brain settle. Passing out is disorienting.

Eliot rubs Quentin’s arm, and his eyes dart all over his face, like he’s looking for assurance or something to fuss over.

“I don’t think I ate enough today.” Quentin tries to sit back up, but Eliot shoves him back down on the bed, possibly with some of his vampire strength because it kind of hurts.

“No,” Eliot tells him. “You stay right there and just- rest or something. Shit, I don’t have any food around here.”

“It’s fine, I’ll eat something when I get back.”

Eliot keeps frantically petting Quentin’s arm even though the imminent threat has definitely passed. “God, don’t let me bite you if you’re gonna pass out.”

“It’s not like I knew I was gonna pass out. That’s never happened before.”

Eliot’s energy calms down and settles into something less stressful for Quentin to watch. Now that he feels almost normal again, he’s even more embarrassed than when he first woke up. This whole time with Eliot, Quentin has been trying to act like a more put-together version of himself: Eliot hasn’t experienced Quentin’s morose moods for years, his melancholic humor, he’s not tired of him the way that Quentin fears his long-term friends might be. More than that, Eliot doesn’t know how ineffectual Quentin sometimes is in the fight against evil. For all their banter, Quentin kind of thinks he’s pulled off looking like a somewhat competent vampire hunter. Eliot’s never seen him so pathetic.

But instead of contempt, Eliot’s reaction to Quentin’s worst day in a while is support. 

“I’m trying my best to be careful with you, but I need you to be careful with yourself, too.”

Quentin wants to cry, the burning ache rising in the back of his throat. “I can probably try harder with that.”

“Okay.”

Eliot slinks up the bed, settling behind Quentin. Quentin goes to turn over to get up or look at him, but Eliot stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Just let me-” Eliot soothes. Eliot helps lift him slightly, and then Quentin’s upper body is being cradled in Eliot’s lap.

They lay there like that, and talk about nothing, and Quentin manages to forget about his darkness for a moment, then an hour. It occurs to Quentin that this is the first time he’s lingered this long beyond the bite point. That makes him worry, makes him wonder if Eliot is just talking him down so he can go in for a heartier bite. But he doesn’t try anything. When Quentin starts to get tired, Eliot helps him get up - even though the dizziness has long since passed - and spots him as he climbs the ladder out of the crypt. 

They don’t discuss it again, but the next week, Quentin notices energy bars tucked away on a shelf in Eliot’s room.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: if biting is an allegory for sex, then there is dub/con in this chapter. It starts when Margo walks in, and can definitely be skipped. I'll summarize what happens in the end-notes for anyone who wants to skip past it.
> 
> I'm going to be updating everyday for the next few days. We have two more chapters after this one where shit really goes down, and I didn't want to leave you guys hanging for too long in the middle of angst and drama. Buckle up, cause we're in for a ride!

“Q!” Julia calls across the quad. She clutches her bag and scarf close to her as she half-jogs to him, cutting him off before he can pretend he didn’t hear her.

“Oh, hey, Jules.” He’s happy to see her, he really is, but he was just thinking about Eliot, and it feels horrible to talk to her when the lie is right at the forefront of his mind. It makes his wrist itch where Eliot last bit him.

“Kady and I are sparring tonight, and if you’d like to place a little bet on me kicking her ass, I wouldn’t say no. You down to watch?”

“I don’t know.” Tuesday nights have kind of become Eliot nights. They don’t have a set schedule, but Quentin would feel weird about bailing. 

“C’mon, we might even let Penny have a go, and I know how much you love seeing us punch him.”

Quentin can’t help the smile that image brings to his face. 

“I know that face.” Julia points at him as she backs away. “You’re in! See you later!”

Oh well, Eliot is a creature of the night. He can wait a little bit for him.

* * *

Quentin Coldwater does not prance. Quentin sulks, or moseys, or maybe on a rare occasion a trip may look like a skip, but he usually walks without a bounce in his step. But tonight, he’s tipsy, and he just saw Penny get punched in the face (twice!), so there’s a certain element of jauntiness to his usually morose gait.

Quentin is happy. 

Quentin’s in such a good mood that he doesn’t even care that he’s about to be bitten. He may even be excited about it. 

He knocks twice on the door to Eliot’s tomb then lets himself in. ”Hello!” he calls out when he doesn’t see anyone on the upper level, and he hears a muffled “Down here!” in reply. 

Quentin descends the ladder and heads to Eliot’s room. He knocks on the doorframe out of politeness even though the door is wide open, and Eliot looks up from his computer.

Quentin is sure he must have known that Eliot has a computer - of course he does, they’re about the same age - but it feels so weird and out of place in this dark crypt. WiFi in a cemetery just feels wrong.

“Hey,” Eliot says with a smile, closing his laptop and putting it aside. 

“Hey.”

“Someone’s happy.”

“Someone just had a fantastic night of watching their arch-nemesis get defeated.”

Eliot raises his eyebrows, no doubt assuming that Quentin may be talking about some kind of actual evil foe. It makes Quentin feel a little silly for having to explain, “I mean, he’s my friend, or not really my friend, we’re both friends with Julia, but, um…”

“You don’t seem like the type to have a frenemy.”

Quentin’s face pinches up at the term. The word alone kind of makes him want to be nicer to Penny, even if he started it. 

Eliot laughs at his obvious discomfort, heading over to the bar cart to whip them up something to drink. 

“Anyway, it’s been a good night for me.” Quentin finishes his story, his good mood still uncowed. “What were you doing?”

“Someone was late so I had to entertain myself.”

Quentin leans himself on Eliot’s dresser, gladly accepting the drink and downing a good third of it. He’s at that stage of tipsy where he just wants to keep drinking to keep feeling this good. And it helps that he knows he’s going to be feeling even better once they get to the biting section of the night. 

“Doing what?” Quentin asks.

“Researching.”

Quentin didn’t think vampires did research, but then again, maybe everyone involved in the supernatural has dusty tombs hidden away somewhere. 

Eliot continues, “I’m looking into where we might be able to stay in Barcelona. I’ve heard it’s wonderful this time of year.”

Eliot says it like it’s nothing.

But it’s not nothing. It means Eliot and Margo are thinking about leaving. They’ve barely been back for two months, and nothing feels resolved, and now they’re just going to pack up and leave. 

“Oh,” is all Quentin can say. He hopes confusion more than sulkiness makes itself known with that short word.

“I’ve still never been, and Margo says Gaudi was a fantastic lover.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely.”

Eliot moves around the room like a hummingbird, a direct contrast to Quentin’s newfound stillness at the news that Eliot is thinking of leaving. Eliot must see something in his face or notice the vibe behind Quentin’s limited responses, because he puts his drink down and wipes a hand over his face. “We don’t have concrete plans yet, Q.”

“No, it’s fine.” Just because Eliot has been feeding on him every week for months, just because he thought they were friends, doesn’t mean he owes him anything. Quentin picks at his jeans. He’s hurt on a personal level, but he thinks he should be more worried on a moral level. If Eliot leaves, then there goes the incentive for him and Margo to stop feeding on people. They’re right back to where they were before, and Quentin would have to trust that somehow they can manage to find consensual victims all around the globe. Quentin is trusting, but he’s not naive enough to believe that that is fully possible. 

Eliot makes a noise of frustration, or maybe annoyance. Great, by trying to be chill now he’s just ended up  _ annoying _ Eliot, which means he’s just going to leave even quicker because this has always just been a convenient arrangement. 

God, when did Quentin start thinking of this as anything more than that? Since when should Quentin be upset that a vampire is skipping town.

“I guess I don’t know what to say,” Eliot says. “This doesn’t have to be a big thing-”

“I’m not making it a big thing.”

“-but I like what we have going. I just also like Europe a lot more than this town.”

“Why did you even come here in the first place?” It’s been nagging at Quentin to varying extents for the past few weeks. As they’ve gotten deeper into it, he’s become less and less sure that Margo and Eliot have a dastardly plan and more comfortable with assuming they were just bored.

Eliot plants himself where he stands. On anyone else the pose might seem timid, but on Eliot it sits regal. “We came back here so that I could understand my life more, understand where I came from. I guess I wanted...” Eliot tapers off. 

“Closure?” Quentin guesses.

“Yeah, or more like clarity. I wanted to see the town I thought might be a haven for me after Indiana, the house I lived in when I died. I thought- ugh, I did not want to have this conversation right now.”

“We don’t have to.” Quentin’s hungry with curiosity, but he values Eliot’s emotional well-being. 

“No, it’s fine. Okay, so I thought moving would save me. I thought a different town, a different state, was big enough to make me feel more like myself, to keep me safe. But it was never going to be that, because I was still under  _ him _ .” 

Quentin has a second of confusion, then fills in, “Your dad.”

“It was all still the same because he didn’t want me to be who I was, and he did everything in his power to keep me miserable and alone. And I thought coming back here would help me understand that more, or at least explain why I had to grow up like that.”

“And you’re leaving because that’s done? And you understand?”

“No, I’m leaving because all I learned is that it fucking sucked. My human life gave me some of the worst parts of myself, and dredging it all up helps me understand myself but it doesn’t make it better. It doesn’t make me better.” Eliot takes a deep, steadying breath. “And worst of all, I thought this town would be a test, like if I could gain something from here then I could handle visiting Indiana and seeing the house where it all started. But I think I’d rather burn that town to the ground than ever step foot in it again.”

Quentin doesn’t know what to say to something so heavy. “Eliot, I-” Quentin makes sure he stares straight into his eyes. “I think you’re one of the most spectacular people I’ve ever met.”

Everything that was dead in Eliot’s eyes comes to life. He looks at him with such emotion, such raw feeling and unshed tears and Quentin thinks  _ oh, you’re beautiful.  _

“Some might even say flamboyant,” Eliot says.

“That, too. It’s a good thing.”

Even though Quentin knew Eliot in high school, up until right now, he's mostly been thinking of him as vampire-Eliot: Human-Eliot was only the backstory to lead Eliot into the life he’s living now. In this moment, though, Quentin can see so clearly the Eliot that’s still inside, the human aspects of him that are still there. And he likes them a lot. 

Quieter, Eliot says, “We wouldn’t leave right away, Q. And definitely not without telling you first.”

“Barcelona seems nice.” Quentin offers it up like an olive branch. As a friend, he can support this.

Eliot laughs, accepting the gesture. “The sun will be a bitch, but when is it not.”

Quentin can feel himself relax. Eliot may be leaving, but it won’t be right away. He has time to figure out what to do about the whole thing, how much he should just accept and if he needs to make some kind of plan. For now, he can just hang out with his friend and get bitten. A typical Tuesday night.

“Hey, little Q,” Margo drawls from behind him, and Quentin is not proud at the way that it startles him out of his skin, and his drink tips precariously towards being spilled all over Eliot’s floor. He didn’t even hear her come in.

“Oh, um, hi Margo.” He almost doesn’t want to look at her. He’s run into her a few times over the past few weeks of their arrangement, but it’s usually in passing, or that one rare time when she was sleeping and for once didn’t look like she was about to eat him.

“Look at him,” she says, and Quentin is pretty sure she’s no longer talking to him. “He’s still so scared of me.”

Eliot raises his eyebrows and smiles wide at her. “Bambi, you’re downright terrifying.”

She slinks around him, seemingly heading towards Eliot, but stops, turns around, and straight up hisses at Quentin. It’s not his fault he has a heightened startle response and nearly jumps out of his skin.

“Oh my god,” Eliot swiftly moves to her, pulling her close like a dance. “You’re gonna give him a heart attack.”

“I would never jeopardize your boytoy like that.”

Eliot smiles and rolls his eyes. 

Quentin nervously looks around the room. Anytime he sees Eliot and Margo together he feels like he’s looking in on something he’s not supposed to. Plus, he doesn’t know how he feels about being called Eliot’s boytoy - he’s offended but he’s also kind of proud.

Margo smiles up at Eliot before looking over to Quentin. Her gaze, a second ago so fond, now feels like a trap that Quentin can’t look away from. “We’re being very good, Quentin, you would be proud.”

“Good job?”

Margo continues like she barely heard him. “But did you know that pig’s blood tastes disgusting? The only good part of the whole deal is the butcher. He’s young, dumb, and hung, which suits me just fine.”

“Margo’s always had an eye for the silver lining,” Eliot comments. 

With a final pat, Margo glides from Eliot over to Quentin. He can feel his body lock up in a freeze response, his heart beating in his throat, and his hands start to feel clammy. He’s kind of annoyed that his perfectly good mood had to be ruined not only by the bomb of Eliot’s departure but now also by fear. Margo makes him want to run but Eliot makes him want to stay.

“Isn’t it sad? A young vampire in her prime reduced to animal blood with not even a weekly human morsel dangled in front of her for good behavior?” For Quentin’s ego, he’s going to assume she said  _ weekly _ and not  _ weakly _ just then. 

“Margo?” Eliot questions, a smile lighting his lips instead of the worry Quentin might expect. He’s not sure he finds that soothing. 

Margo presses both hands on Quentin’s chest, her nails lightly digging into his shirt.

“Hey, Quentin, can I have a taste?”

“Um-”

Eliot rolls his eyes in fond exasperation at Margo’s antics, as if this is just some mild quirk of hers and not, you know, asking to take real, live blood out of his real, live body. 

“I can be just as careful as El, I promise.” Margo keeps stroking his chest, and he can feel himself relax. He shouldn’t, he’s not sure if he wants to, but he is. And he starts to actually consider it: what’s one more vampire when he’s already letting one feed on him every week? But then he knows it’s different, knows there’s something different about Eliot.

Eliot steps closer and places a comforting hand on Quentin’s shoulder. “It’s up to you, Q. No one’s gonna force you to do anything.” While Quentin believes that about Eliot, his experience so far with Margo does not give him confidence. “Right?” Eliot pointedly glares at Margo.

“Yeah, whatever,” Margo waves the air like she’s waving away the idea. “I won’t jump you. But you should definitely let me drink from you. It’s only fair.”

Quentin looks at Margo and her short but powerful frame. It reminds him of Julia.

He looks over to Eliot. “What do you want?”

Quentin thinks he sees Margo give Eliot a surprised and amused look, but he actually wants to know his opinion. If anyone in this room is an expert on Margo, it’s Eliot.

“I think it would be really nice to feed from you at the same time. And hot.”

And there’s that flirtation that Quentin has no idea what to do with. He swallows, looks back to Margo’s bold hands rubbing his chest, and makes his choice. 

“Okay.”

“Really?” Eliot questions.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, huh El? I should know, I was there.”

Quentin squints his eyes in disbelief at that - he read the watcher diaries, and Margo only starts coming up around the 1700s, not to mention the lack of evidence that the Trojan War actually happened - but sometimes he values his life, so he doesn’t say anything. 

“Are you ready to have your world rocked?” Margo asks him, and while it’s a nice change to have her speak so normally and directly to him instead of about him, he’s still not sure he really trusts her.

With a hand on Quentin’s shoulder, Eliot leads him to the bed. In a conspiratorial whisper that’s definitely loud enough for Margo to hear, Eliot says, “For all her posturing, Margo is actually remarkably good at taking care of people. C’mon, lie down and let us work our magic.”

Quentin nods his head and sits himself on the bed. Margo prowls closer, her boots clicking against the floor, and Eliot keeps his hand on Quentin’s shoulder, a constant throughout this whole ordeal. Quentin rolls his sleeves up, but his sweater is a little tighter today, so it digs into his forearms where it’s bunched up, his veins standing out under his white skin. 

“That looks uncomfortable,” Eliot says, completely casual. 

“I mean, yeah, a little.” It’s fine though, it’s not like this is going to take too long if they just get to it.

“Why don’t you take it off,” Margo suggests.

Quentin’s eyes awkwardly dart around the room. While sitting here in his undershirt wouldn’t be the most scandalous thing, it just feels weighty. 

“You wouldn’t want us to accidentally get some blood on it just because it won’t stay up, right?” Eliot smoothes his hand along where he’s grasping his shoulder. Quentin supposes he could believe that Eliot actually cares about the integrity of his clothing.

Quentin grasps the ends of his shirt and, with a final incredulous look at Eliot, lifts it over his head.

More than exposed, he feels kind of stupid in his jeans, tank top, and boots. It feels like he’s trying to wear the caricature of some big bad vampire hunter when he’s just some college kid over his head. 

“Damn, Coldwater, you’ve been hiding muscles under those sweaters,” Margo exclaims, suddenly too close and touching him. “Maybe you actually could kill us.”

“Hey,” Quentin moves his hand to swipe her away, but remembers how well that went last time he tried to hold her back and stops. 

“Be nice, Bambi,” Eliot teases.

Margo rolls her eyes, and, in the next blink, is suddenly straddling Quentin.

“Whoa,” Quentin’s hands fly up from where they were on the bed, suddenly very uncomfortable and very unsure about what is happening and where his hands should go.

“What, this isn’t how Eliot bites you?” Margo’s face is way too close to Quentin’s, and he can see the utter delight behind her too-intense eyes, and now that she’s on him she won’t stop wiggling.

“Um, no,” Quentin groans, “Until now this has been a straddle-free zone.”

Margo gasps and clutches a hand to her chest. “He speaks!”

All Quentin can do in response to that is glower. 

He feels a weight settle behind him, and he has never been happier to have Eliot close.

Eliot rests his head on Quentin’s shoulder and plays his fingers down his arm towards the usual bite spot. In the next second Quentin can feel an extra ridge against him, a strange protrusion that feels like it must be the extended brow of Eliot’s vampire-face, a face he still has yet to see in the months that they’ve been doing this. 

What he does have a front row seat for is Margo’s vampire-face. She shifts right in front of him, her face so close. Quentin can see every single ridge, every muscle, as it moves to reveal the demon within - her forehead almost seems to shrink as her brows tilt in, her eyes turning golden and piercing, her fangs descending. After seeing the demon take over Margo’s face, he’s not sure he wants to see it on Eliot.

“You’re so precious,” Margo coos at him. Quentin is sure his trepidation and flurry of thoughts play on his face.

Eliot picks up the wrist closest to him, and Margo does the same with the other. Quentin has a moment to be thankful that at least they’re both going for the previously agreed upon spot for feeding before suddenly he has twin pairs of vampire fangs puncturing his skin.

It’s a lot.

Somehow Quentin has gotten pretty used to being bitten by one vampire. He knows the way that Eliot likes to tease a little beforehand, then generally goes in soft and luxuriates in the bite. He didn’t realize he’d become so attuned to how Eliot does it until he suddenly has another experience to compare it to. Margo just goes for it. Maybe she doesn’t care about human discomfort, or maybe it’s like getting your blood drawn - it’s better if the needle just goes in fast so that the hard part is done and you can relax. Margo’s teeth pierce him fast and painful, but then the pain is done and he’s just being sucked on from both ends.

When Margo asked him weeks ago if he was a vampire groupie, he never could have predicted he’d end up here. He’s not sure if it was always like this or Eliot’s rewired his brain, but it feels good. It feels so good to have Margo on one wrist and Eliot on the other, and - whoa, Quentin realizes that he’s hard. It hasn’t happened while being fed on in awhile. 

The last time he got noticeably hard when Eliot was feeding on him, at least they’d been sitting next to each other. Now, Quentin has a lapful of hungry vampire grinding down on him and he’s aware that things could get very embarrassing very quickly.

“Hey, wait,” Quentin moans, and it’s already embarrassing how breathily that comes out. They’re still taking drags from him, light little pulls that feel like they’re going straight to his cock, working him up to a hardness level he didn’t know he could get just from being bitten.

Quentin’s brain is running a mile a minute, but at the same time it feels like he can’t think. 

Margo pulls off his arm abruptly, not stopping to lick his wound closed, not even wrapping a cursory hand around his wrist. Quentin wants to put pressure on it, wants to stop before it goes too far, but Margo shoves his hand down with one hand and yanks his hair and exposes his neck with the other.

“Margo,” Quentin yells, and he means to tell her to stop, wants to say no, but then Margo is already on his neck and biting into the flesh of him.

Quentin cries out louder at the sharp pain of it. It’s worse than his wrists, the pain sharp and hot, then sluggishly radiating through him as Margo sucks on his neck. His whole body is lit up with pain and pleasure, and Eliot is still suckling on his wrist, and Margo has him pinned with her body and hands and mouth, and Quentin has no idea how he got in so deep.

Each suck brings him closer and closer to the edge, and Quentin really does not want to come. He squeezes his eyes shut, willing the experience to be over, hoping Margo will take her fill and then be done. 

But she’s not. Margo on his neck and Eliot on his wrist keep swallowing his blood, and suddenly Quentin is coming. He shouts at the strange sensation. His cock feels too sensitive, his whole body feels too sensitive. 

“Stop,” he moans, and there’s a moment where they don’t even listen to that, and Quentin really starts to panic. “Stop,” he says even clearer, trying to flail under their grips until Margo finally decides to let up. Quentin doesn’t notice when Eliot pulls back.

“What the fuck,” Quentin says, hand flying up to cover his neck, except that his wrists have also been bitten so there’s just blood everywhere. 

“Thanks for the drink, kid.” Margo licks her lips and swings off of him. She has the grace to look serious instead of teasing, but there’s no apology there. 

Quentin looks to Eliot, eyes wide, and sees Eliot pressing gauze to his wrist. It feels wholly ineffective against how many bites Quentin currently has in him. 

“Shit, we need a towel,” Eliot mutters. He quickly tapes the wrist closest to him before grabbing one, a pretty, ornate towel with a beautiful burgundy mix of patterns. Eliot presses it over Quentin’s neck.

“Are you okay?” Eliot asks. Quentin laughs - it just feels so absurd. 

Quentin looks around the room briefly, noting that Margo seems to have slunk back from whence she came. “My neck…” he mumbles. 

Eliot pulls the towel back to look at the wound for a moment, then pushes it back against him. Quentin almost feels like he might topple over at the force of the pressure.

“It’ll be fine,” Eliot says, but he doesn’t take his hand away and he looks worried. 

Quentin feels dirty and exposed. His jeans are sticky with come, his arms are sticky with blood, and he feels guilty, like he finally got what was coming to him for starting this deal in the first place. He’s torn between wanting to crawl into bed and never come out and taking comfort in Eliot’s arms even though he was a part of this. 

It occurs to Quentin that the bite on his neck is going to be tough to hide. Luckily, he tends to wear collars in the cooler months, but he has no idea how long something like this is going to take to heal. He really hopes Julia doesn’t notice.

“I wanna go home,” Quentin states. He hopes it doesn’t come out as pathetic as he feels.

“Yeah, okay,” Eliot murmurs, still pressing the towel against his neck. “Can I walk you?”

“No.” Quentin shakes his head and hisses as the movement pulls at his neck. 

“You’re kind of covered in blood. Something might smell you…”

Quentin really just wants to be alone right now. “I’ll be fine.”

“At least let me finish with these,” Eliot says. Quentin looks at his face, and his eyes are sad. Good, he should feel bad. 

“Fine.”

Eliot wraps up his wrist, then folds a bigger piece of gauze over his neck and tapes it down. Quentin will probably have to look at them again at home, but they’re covered for now. 

He pulls his sweater back on and feels blessedly more normal. 

“Same time next week?” Eliot attempts, and Quentin doesn’t know if he’s ever seen him look so unsure of himself. 

“Yeah, sure.” 

Quentin powerwalks home and tries not to think about what just happened. He slathers his wounds in neosporin, hoping against hope that nothing scars. It feels dramatic, but he roots through his drawer to find an old cross necklace from years ago, the weight of it feeling like security, assurance that this doesn’t have to happen again. He showers and throws himself under his sheets, happy that he knows for certain that this place is vampire-safe. 

He can’t keep going like this. No matter what he’s started to think, Margo and Eliot aren’t safe. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do - if he can find a way to give them souls or if he finally has to face the music and kill them.

It’s time to do something. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dub/con summary: Quentin agrees to let Margo and Eliot bite him at the same time, but he does not agree to let anyone bite his neck. Margo goes for it anyway, Quentin comes, and he feels violated.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are y’all ready for a monster of the week to reveal some revelations about our beloved characters? I know I am.

The search for how to give a vampire a soul has grown frantic. It’s been a few days since Margo bit him, and time suddenly feels like it is very much of the essence. The holidays are coming up, the weather growing colder, but Quentin feels like he’s coming out of hibernation.

This arrangement he’s had with Eliot has only been a band-aid on a festering wound. It’s hopefully kept them in line so far, but if what Margo did proved anything to him, it’s that they’re willing to play loose with his rules. Quentin wishes he could confront Margo with his feelings, but he doesn’t think that would go over well for him, so Quentin is throwing himself into something that might actually fix everything. Quentin has known the whole time that it couldn’t last forever, and it’s time to figure out a more lasting solution.

The problem is that Quentin does not possess the expertise to figure it out.

As with most things, Quentin tries to make up for his lack of experience with enthusiasm. He spends late nights in the library pouring over watcher books, wracking his brain for some kind of solution, but the answer proves sufficiently obtuse. Most of the journals that mention vampires only detail their many crimes and swift stakings, and the books that mention souls tend to focus on them as more of a religious concept than a physical thing that you might want to shove back in a body. It’s all infinitely frustrating. 

Because that frustration has grown to a crescendo, Quentin’s patience for whatever monster of the week Fogg has gathered them to research and fight has run thin.

“Nice moves,” Penny says, entering the classroom they use to hold their club gatherings. Kady and Julia are sparring, and Penny could have just as easily meant the complement for either of them. Quentin’s patience with Penny is also running thin. 

He’s fighting a headache, and the noise isn’t helping. 

Quentin looks up from the demon anthology he’s been flipping through and winces when he sees Julia land a particularly nasty hit to Kady’s left side. 

“Less power!” Kady groans. “You’re gonna slayer-strength me into the hospital.”

“Don’t get hit,” Julia retorts, but Quentin can see that she’s loosened up her fighting style to let Kady get her bearings again. 

Quentin looks over to Alice, raises his eyebrows at the exchange, and she smiles back before burying her nose in her own book.

Quentin goes back to his, but his heart’s not in it and he’s pretty sure he hasn’t absorbed anything about the - he has to look back to the top of the page to check - Conchlar demon and death rites. He’s frustrated and distracted, the worst combination he could be feeling when he has a goal in mind. He’s emotionally frazzled, and on top of all of that he’s sporting three bite marks when usually he only has to contend with one per week, one of which makes itself known with a twinge of pain everytime he turns his neck. He doesn’t think anyone’s noticed, but he feels on edge with the possibility of it and has been stressing out trying not to give away that he has healing injuries.

Penny slings his bag onto the half-covered tables. None of the books go flying, but Quentin’s face pinches in irritation at the noise and rustling of his stuff. 

“Anything going on in slayer world?” Penny questions.

Luckily for Quentin, Alice takes the lead on filling Penny in on what little Fogg told them when calling the meeting. “Fogg said he might have a lead on a new creature, something that’s been eating fishermen.”

“Indeed I do, Alice,” Dean Fogg announces as he enters the classroom.

Quentin puts his book down for good as Dean Fogg walks in, not caring wherever he left off. 

“I almost had you,” Kady says to Julia, breaking fighting form to lightly shove her shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah,” Julia replies, wiping the sweat from her brow, a huge smile on her face. 

“Gather round, children,” Dean Fogg beckons. “My sources say that there’s a new demon in town. Something has been leaving a trail of bodies along the docks.”

“And we’re sure it’s not just some vampire?” Penny says.

“Yes, I’m certain,” Dean Fogg says. “Vampires tend to leave a cleaner crime scene. Whatever this is, it’s … messy.”

Quentin’s face turns down at the thought. Alice, on the other hand, seems to focus entirely on the puzzle of it all and says, “How so?” At least someone in this group can compartmentalize.

“Unfortunately, the demon - or creature - is eating its victims. From what I’ve seen of the autopsy photographs, it looks like entire sections of flesh are missing. It would be highly unusual for a vampire to make this kind of scene.”

“Okay, so we know whatever it is is very bad and doing horrible things,” Julia summarizes, “But do we know where it is? How do I kill it?”

“I’m afraid I’ve not managed to work those details out yet. The watcher online database is still in its infancy, no matter how many goddamn letters I send or councilmembers I speak to, so, as always, the going is slow and tedious. I’ve put out feelers in the demon bars, so if someone on the ground knows something, we’ll know something.”

“In the meantime, we research,” Kady fills in after taking a swig from her water bottle. “And then we find whatever is terrorizing the good fishermen of New Jersey and kick its face in.”

Julia gives a single clap. “Great plan.”

“One of my best.” Kady smirks. 

“I’ll order the pizza,” Quentin grumbles.

* * *

Researching leads to reconnaissance, and the task is deemed safe enough for Quentin to be paired with Julia. They walk down to the docks, the smell of river-water strong in the air, the golden light of dusk illuminating the scene. While probably safe, it feels creepy. 

Julia swings her stake in the air, catching it over and over again as they walk along the docks.

“Are you at all prepared for finals?” Julia questions. “I’ve been so focused on training lately that I feel like I blinked and suddenly fall semester was over.”

“Yeah, it’s been pretty crazy.” Quentin feels guilty that his mind has been so focused on Eliot and trying to stave off a personal disaster that he hasn’t really been savoring their final year as a merry band of demonhunters. 

“We’re gonna be graduating so soon, and I have no idea what life post-school even looks like for a slayer. I kind of stopped trying to picture the future years ago, and now all of a sudden everyone is saying we need to plan.”

Quentin can relate; he also stopped trying to picture himself too far in the future. The thought that it was about a 50/50 chance of him still being around was just too depressing. 

“If it makes you feel any better, I also have no idea what to do.”

Julia smiles. “Thank you for the empathy. We’ll just be listless together. Hey, maybe I’ll go to grad school. Do you think they’d let me do a thesis in ass-kicking?”

“An M.A. in Badassery? Why not?”

Quentin’s reminded of when they transitioned from high school to college. Quentin could have left, gone to any other similar school in the region, but he stayed. For Julia, to fight the good fight. He had something that he knew was important, a sense of purpose, but he doesn’t know if he still has that. And now there’s so many of them in the fight. Do they really all need to stick together to keep fighting back the forces of darkness?

In the dark of the dock, Quentin can only barely make it out, but he thinks he sees something strange on the ground. 

“Do you see that?” He says.

“What?” Julia asks, trailing behind him.

He moves forward, bending down and squinting at the weird thatch of something that he saw glinting in the light. 

“Q?” He hears vaguely from behind him.

Quentin’s focus is hyperfixated on the spikes in front of him. “Do these look like- like porcupine needles? But, like, giant?”

“Q!” Quentin turns around to face Julia, the tone of her voice making him think that he’s about to see a monster, but instead all he sees is Julia looking concerned and staring at his neck.

Shit.

His hand flies up, and he feels a patch of bandage peeking out from under his collar.

“Shit.”

Julia takes a step closer to him. He can see a tumult of fury growing under the surface of her calm exterior. “What is that?” Julia says through clenched teeth. 

“I, uh, cut myself shaving.”

“Quentin.”

If Julia is using his full name, he knows she means business. 

It crosses through his mind that this could be the moment - all the pain and hurt of the last few months could be over in an instant. He could tell Julia. She’d be so pissed at him, but he knows she would understand him. 

But she wouldn’t understand Margo and Eliot, wouldn’t even think them worthy of understanding. For all they’ve fucked up, Quentin doesn’t want to just throw them to the wolves. 

“I was patrolling again.”

If lying by omission felt shitty, lying by explicitly telling his best friend a lie feels even shittier. 

“Quentin.” The fury is still there, but it’s laced with concern. Her hand comes up to tug on his bandage, and he hisses as she pulls it away, revealing the twin holes that are clearly a scabbing vampire bite. “This looks terrible.”

“You should see the other guy.”

He was trying for a joke, but all he gets is a glare in return. 

“This is exactly why I don’t want you out there. You could have died! This bite makes it clear you almost did.” Julia releases a noise of frustration that reverberates through the docks. 

“I didn’t.”

Julia clenches her fists at her side and pulls away from him, and Quentin thinks he can almost see her jaw clench. Trying to placate her is obviously not working. “That doesn’t matter! You are so reckless with yourself. I thought I didn’t have to worry about you as much anymore, but obviously I do.”

His lie may be fake, but this argument feels real and Julia’s words weasel under his skin. “I’m not some dog you have to take out for walks, Julia. I am perfectly capable of keeping myself out of harm’s way most of the time. Maybe if you’d let me actually help I wouldn’t-“

“So now it’s my fault you got bitten by a vampire?”

“No, but I shouldn’t be regulated to the most asinine tasks just because I don’t have any special powers.”

“You think I don’t worry about all of you? Being the slayer is supposed to be a one woman job. Every person I’ve told, everybody I’ve brought in, their blood is on my hands if something turns sour. So, no, Quentin, you’re not some special stupid human boy we all look down on, you’re just the one of us who keeps doing stupid shit.”

Quentin doesn’t want to cry, but he can feel it start. All the stress of hiding everything the past few weeks, what happened with Margo, all of it is right there under the surface. And when all he wants is a hug and understanding from his best friend, instead he’s got this argument because he can’t just be fucking honest. 

“Well, if I’m so stupid then obviously you don’t need my help with this,” Quentin chokes out. 

“That’s not what I said.”

“Whatever.”

Quentin pulls out a gallon-sized ziplock bag to transfer the porcupine-like needles he’s pretty sure came from the demon. His work here is done, he was as helpful as he can be, and now he just wants to go home. 

Quentin shoves the bag into Julia’s arms. “Here, you can take it back yourself, I’m going home.”

Julia opens her mouth and Quentin cuts her off with a clipped, “Straight home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He stalks away without looking behind him.

* * *

The next night, Quentin can’t avoid Eliot any longer. It’s been a hell of a week. A week of having a hole in his neck and trying to act normal and all it’s gotten him is a fight with his best friend. Quentin is tired of this whole thing, but he has to at least show up. He doesn’t know what Eliot would do if he didn’t.

Quentin enters the crypt, and thankfully Margo is nowhere in sight. After having to pretend everything is fine with all his friends, he doesn’t know what he’d do if he had to do the same with the vampire that bit him.

Eliot is sitting up in bed, seemingly lost in thought. 

Quentin stays near the door and crosses his arms, already on the full defense. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Eliot drawls.

His eyes seem like they’re only half focusing on him.

“Um- how are you?” Quentin prods. 

“I’m good, how are you?” Every word is overenunciated, and Quentin doesn’t understand what Eliot’s playing at. They’ve been chatting like old friends for weeks, so this new stilted small talk feels unsettling.

“Fine.” His skin itches. He looks around the room for something to talk about, not really wanting to jump right in to the blood drinking part of the night. Eliot doesn’t seem too eager for it either if the way he’s sprawling is any indication. “There’s a new demon in town,” Quentin offers. “Something with big spines coming out of it. Likes the taste of fishermen.”

“Hmm.”

Quentin looks at Eliot expectantly. “You don’t happen to know anything about that, do you?”

“I’m a little-” Eliot laughs at himself, and it’s too loud and brash for the vibe in the room. Eliot usually seems cool and collected, and Quentin doesn’t understand why he seems so weird right now. “I’m a little out of the loop.”

“Okay…” Quentin takes another step forward. There’s almost always some kind of mood lighting happening in Eliot’s room when he gets here, candles set up to create the illusion of intimacy and make it a little hard to see all the details. They light the room now, but something’s off: it’s like Eliot barely put in the effort, the wax spilling over some and others left completely unlit. When he steps closer, Quentin can make out his face better, specifically, his blown out pupils. 

“Did you take something?” Quentin questions, almost relieved to find an answer that makes sense. 

“No.”

“You definitely did. What was it?” Quentin grasps Eliot’s shoulders, peering into his face, and he’s relieved he still wants to touch him after everything that happened last week. Eliot bats at his hand, trying to sit up, but Quentin holds him in place. 

“I didn’t take anything,” Eliot denies.

“You’re definitely high.” Quentin doesn’t know why Eliot’s trying so hard to refute something so obvious.

“When you’re a vampire, there are other ways to get high.” 

Quentin’s brows furrow. 

And then he gets it. 

Quentin jumps back from the bed, his hands flying off Eliot so fast he almost topples over. He can’t believe it. After everything he’s done for weeks, all the lies, all the pain he’s caused himself and now Julia, after everything, Eliot’s gone and done this.

“You fed on someone,” Quentin says, his voice sounding foreign to his own ears.

Eliot closes his eyes and tips his head back. “Yes.”

“Some person was high, so you fed on them, so you could get high,” Quentin spits out. 

Eliot seems to gather himself, pushing his shoulders back and trying to look him in the eye, but his eyes still won’t focus correctly. “I have to admit, the high part was an accident.”

“Oh my god.”

“No need to bring God into this.”

“You-” Quentin points at Eliot, wanting to tear out his own hair, or maybe Eliot’s hair, anything. “You’ve been feeding on me for weeks, telling me that you’re being good, that you’re not evil, that you-” His mind is racing so fast he almost can’t get his words out he’s so mad. “Pig’s blood! All the talk about butchers and logistics and everything, and you’ve been feeding on people anytime you’d like this whole time.”

For all Quentin can recognize that maybe his plan was stupid, he could always console himself with the fact that at least it was working. He can’t believe he assumed that just because nothing showed up in the papers or from Julia that Margo and Eliot had to have stopped biting people completely. That they  _ kept their word. _

Eliot scrambles out of bed, balance off and eyes squinted tight. The whole display makes Quentin uncomfortable with how embarrassing it looks. “I’m a vampire, Quentin, or have you forgotten?” Eliot mocks. 

A frenzied laugh works its way out of Quentin. He rips off the bandages on his wrists, his neck, throwing the largest one at Eliot’s feet. “No, I think I have a pretty good memory for that.”

A horrible thought occurs to Quentin. 

“Have you killed anybody? Since coming here?”

“No, of course not.”

Quentin lets out a breath. His hand rubs a half-thought out gesture over his face before lifting, palm open and fingers wide in frustration. He opens his mouth to say something, then just closes it instead. He doesn’t know what he could say now to make this better or just make Eliot  _ see _ . Everything they’ve talked about, every insight he feels like he’s given or Eliot seems to have, none of it has been enough. 

Eliot slinks towards Quentin’s space. Quentin hasn’t felt like prey since the first night he re-met Eliot as a vampire, but he feels it again now. He takes Quentin’s wrist, stroking a finger along his pulse point, trying to play the calm and collected vampire.

“C’mon, I can bite you like normal and it’ll be good, I promise.” 

Eliot’s promises don’t mean anything anymore. Quentin shakes his head.

“That is the last thing I want right now.”

Eliot’s height looming over him this close usually makes Quentin feel safe and protected. Right now, it makes him feel boxed in.

“You don’t care about any of this,” Quentin whispers. His heart aches with how much he cares. “You just don’t want to be alone.”

Eliot keeps trying to soothe, playing his hands over him, and his voice comes out too soft and delicate even though his eyes are wild. “That’s not true, I thrive alone.”

Quentin scoffs. “You’re so selfish. You got run of Europe and came to slum it in our hometown. I was a game to you.”

Quentin looks up, craning his head to look straight into Eliot’s eyes, needing to see… something. He’s not sure if he’s capable of picking out the truth from lies and half-truths, but he thinks he should be able to see some kind of clue on Eliot’s face. His eyes shimmer, and Quentin doesn’t know if that means he should trust him or not.

“You weren’t a game.”

Quentin yanks his wrist out of Eliot’s grasp and refolds his hands over his chest. 

Eliot looks at him pleading for another moment, eyes wide and begging him to understand. When Quentin doesn’t give him reciprocity, Eliot turns away, face tight in thought and feet pacing across the room. 

All of a sudden, he stops and turns back towards Quentin. His eyes are still blown wide, but they’re focused completely on Quentin with an almost unsettling effect. 

“Blood is time,“ Eliot starts, like it’s continuing a thought he was having in his head. “Don’t you want more time?”

“What?” Quentin takes a step back. 

“How do you feel about dying a feeble, mortal death?”

“Um, not great, but the alternative sounds pretty fucking terrifying, too, so…”

Eliot nods, but it looks like it’s more to himself than to anything Quentin said. Quentin has never seen Eliot desperate before. “But you wouldn’t be like you are now. You could change, become the person you know you could be if your brain could just shut up for a moment.”

Quentin stares at him, eyes wide.

Eliot steps closer again, not going for his wrist this time but his arms, a hand moving up to grip his shoulder. He bends his head down to look right at him, and Quentin is so confused at the wild tumult of emotion behind Eliot’s eyes. Eliot says, “I know you. I know what it’s like to hate who you are, to dread waking up in the morning.” Eliot tilts his head and strokes a hand up and down his arm. “If you come with me, you’ll never have to wake up another morning again. Come into the dark, Q.”

Quentin’s trapped. The anger has drained into exhaustion and well, he’s just sad. Seeing Eliot like this makes him sad. “Just stop.”

“I can make it quick, you’d be waking up again before you even realized anything was wrong.”

Eliot leans towards his neck. To seduce or hug or try something, Quentin’s not sure, but the second he makes contact, he hisses and jumps away.

Quentin feels the weight of the cross necklace he put around his neck after Margo bit him. 

He looks up, and sees something he hasn’t seen before: Eliot’s vampire face.

Everywhere that was once smooth is bumpy, ridges rippling down Eliot’s forehead, his eyes glow amber and teeth elongate. He looks like a monster. Eliot doesn’t move towards him again. Betrayal, then acceptance settles over Eliot’s face, and he doesn’t shift back to his human visage. Even though Quentin is looking at the monster that’s been inside Eliot this whole time, he can’t help but think about the scared boy that was turned too young.

Quentin says, “I wish we got to know each other before you were killed.”

Eliot stares at him through demon-eyes, stock still.

“Me, too.”

Quentin backs up and turns the doorknob behind him, opening it slowly while keeping his eyes firmly locked on Eliot. “Don’t come after me. If you can promise me one thing, at least promise me that.”

Eliot nods. Quentin hopes he remembers when he comes down.

* * *

What a mess. This night has been a mess, the past few months have been a mess, hell maybe even the whole year. The aftermath of adrenaline and anxiety work through him to create a tingling effect all through his extremities as he walks out of the graveyard, and he’s got the distinctive feeling of tears catching in his throat.

The betrayal hurts, but more than that Quentin is worried about his own apparent complete lack of character judgment. Why would he think that Eliot could be trusted? He’s just another vampire, he’s always been another vampire. Just because he’s nice and didn’t kill anyone and took care of Quentin when he was down and - okay, Quentin found him attractive, he can see that now - all of that doesn’t automatically mean he deserves trust.

For all Quentin’s assumptions, he doesn’t actually know if Eliot’s been feeding on people behind his back the  _ entire _ time they’ve been talking. But even once feels like enough, feels like enough to hurt his pride, hurt his morals, and hurt his feelings. Hurt and alone and without anyone to call for support. 

Penny calls him.

It may not be the support he needs, but it’ll do.

“Hi,” Quentin says into the receiver, and he’s relieved his voice doesn’t betray his emotional state.

“Hey, I know Julia’s really pissed, and you’re probably pissed, too, but we figured out the demon thing, so if you think you can help, time to step up.”

Quentin takes a breath, the weight of the world crashing around him, but he has to focus. He can’t fix whatever just happened with Eliot, but he can fix this. “What is it?”

“Something called a-” Quentin hears a rustling on the other end of the line “Gizlicin, literally a secret demon.”

Quentin rubs a hand over his aching eyes. “Secret demon?”

“Yeah, it feeds on secrets. And human flesh. The books say those processes are separate, but who knows.”

“Why was it going after fishermen?” His mind runs through a million poetic possibilities about the sea holding many secrets or horny fishermen keeping their torrid affairs close to home after months together on the rocky waves. 

“Says here it just likes being wet.”

Fair enough.

“I don’t know if Julia wants me there,” Quentin says plaintively.

“I don’t really care about whatever drama you two have going on. The whole team’s going, ergo, you go. Grab an axe and meet us at the docks in twenty minutes. The size of those quills make me think this thing is gonna be big, and we can use all hands on deck.”

Maybe he shouldn’t be wielding heavy weapons when he feels so emotionally fragile, but the gang needs him. Julia needs him. No matter what, he’s never going to intentionally let her down.

“Get it together, and get over it, Coldwater. See you soon.”

“Yeah, okay, bye.”

Everything with Eliot may be falling down around him, but he can still help. 

Quentin races through his apartment just long enough to grab an axe - a possession he would never have betted on owning ten years ago - and heads to the docks. The area’s familiar, but it feels different in the dark, more foreboding. Quentin lives closer to this area than the school, so he has a few minutes of awkwardly waiting around hoping that nothing eats him before the rest of the gang shows up.

“He made it,” Penny drones. Quentin’s too anxious about Julia to even care about the sarcasm.

“Hey,” Quentin offers and lumbers over, axe swung over his shoulder. 

“Hey.” Julia looks confident but kind. Quentin gets the feeling that she knows she was right, which should be insufferable, but given what he just went through with Eliot, Quentin can acknowledge that she has reason to worry about him.

But this isn’t the time for feelings. They have a job to do, so he settles with a meaningful nod, and Julia returns it. It’s going to take something bigger than a fight about how much they care about each other to shake them.

Julia raises her sword and crows, “Let’s get ourselves a demon.”

They find the Gizlicin easily enough, that’s not the hard part. It’s huge and round and looks totally out of place among the wooden slats and boats on the docks.

No, the difficult part is felling the damn thing. It does not go well.

Julia makes a first bid of violence towards it, but they didn’t expect its spines to be covering a shield-like hard shell of a back. Instead of fighting a big porcupine, it’s more like fighting a big armadillo that wants to eat them, and Julia’s sword barely makes a dent. The demon pushes her backwards, and Alice and Kady go in for the double team, Alice working some spell while Kady tries to hack her way into the beast. 

Quentin keeps at the perimeter, waiting for a moment to use his axe or help anyone away if they get injured. 

“I think it’s bone!” Kady shouts as her spear fails to puncture the demon’s back, right before the thing uses a giant clawed arm to whip her across the dock and into a structure of stacked boxes.

“Kady!” Penny yells, rushing over to her.

Alice throws another spell toward the massive thing, but instead of being absorbed and doing damage, it bounces back off and pummels back to Alice. It must have been a blunt force spell, because it throws her back and away from the fight.

The Gizlicin moves towards Julia, boxing her in, separating her from the rest of the group. She tries a sword, a punch, expert moves that only seem to make the demon angrier and more prone to flailing its bulky arms in her direction. A particularly vicious swipe knocks her down, and Quentin winces at the loud crack as her head connects with the dock. 

His whole body just stops in fear in the moment that Julia stays down. But then she opens her eyes and gets to her feet, even if her steps are groggy and balance seems off. She’s alive, but things are not looking good.

With a frantic, “Hey!” Quentin rushes forward with his axe, hitting the Gizlicin on the back in a desperate bid to distract it. But the thing barely seems to notice him and instead just moves forward towards Julia. A Julia that, for once, legitimately and truly needs Quentin’s help.

Up to this point, the fight has made him anxious and brain-sluggish, but now that Julia is legitimately in danger, it feels like fight or flight is finally working for him and his brain goes sharp. He remembers the basic information Penny gave him on the phone: this demon eats people, eats secrets, and loves being wet. Quentin glances over to the river, wonders if there’s something he can do to lure the demon back to the water.

And then it comes to him, a simple idea that just might work. If the demon wants secrets, Quentin can give it secrets.

“Hey Gizlipuff!” Quentin yells, punctuating the bastardized name with an ineffective hit of his axe. “I cheated on my Calculus final in high school!”

The demon takes a shallow breath while yellow mist floats from Quentin. It takes it, but it barely takes any time at all to digest and then the thing is right back to descending on a Julia that hasn’t gotten her bearings yet. 

The idea is kind of working, but he needs more or better secrets. 

It’s really hard to think of any other secret when Eliot is at the forefront of his mind, but he tries his hardest for Julia.

“I peed my pants in grade school and blamed it on another kid.”

It’s better, but it’s still not enough.

Quentin would never wish a concussion on anyone, but he really hopes Julia is still out of it enough not to process what he’s about to say next. “I had a crush on Julia for the first half of my life.”

That one takes longer to swallow, enough for Julia to stumble back to give herself more time, but it’s still not enough. Quentin swings the axe again, but the secrets aren’t making its back less hard.

“I want to die all the time. Even when I feel good, even when I have a good day, part of me still wants to die,” Quentin yells, yelling his lifelong struggle out into the night like it’s nothing just to be eaten up by a demon. A demon who is still advancing on Julia while their friends try to gather, try to make a plan, try to do anything to save Julia from the fate of every slayer before her.

Fuck, this is bad. All the easy secrets that he keeps on loop when he has insomnia are out there now, but the demon still isn’t dealt with.

He has to say it. If it can help Julia, he can do this. The biggest secret he’s ever had in his entire life should be a big enough meal for this damned thing.

“Eliot Waugh is a vampire. And I’ve been letting him feed on me.”

The Gizlicin doubles over with the enormity of it. 

It flails out and catches Quentin with an arm that sends him flying backwards. 

Right before losing consciousness, Quentin sees Julia rise and plunge her sword straight through the demon’s heart. 


	8. Chapter 8

When Quentin awakens, he’s not on the dock anymore. He feels groggy, like his limbs are too heavy for his body, and a little dizzy. There’s cool concrete beneath him and a chipped ceiling above, and he lets himself lay still for a moment and get his bearings.

“Ugh,” he says aloud into the room. Now that he’s coming back to consciousness, he notices that his head is pounding. 

The floor feels great, but Quentin tries to sit up. He’s pleased that everything still works. 

“Oh good, you’re awake.” Dean Fogg rises from a chair in the corner, his voice inflectionless. 

“Lucky me.”

There are bars all around him stretching from floor to ceiling. They’ve put him in the cage they keep for emergencies tucked away in an unused room in the psych building’s basement. 

Quentin questions, “Doesn’t this seem a little extreme?”

Dean Fogg steps closer to the cage, unconcerned with keeping his distance, and folds his hands politely in front of him. “Given the fact that you’ve been hiding a murderer, I assure you, this is not too extreme. We need to test you for thrall. And sanity.”

Quentin’s brows tighten. “I didn’t think vampires had thrall.”

“It’s not the most popular skill, but some vampires do possess it. Dracula, for example.”

“Dracula isn’t real.”

“He most certainly is, and he’s insufferable. And while I seriously doubt a toddler vampire has managed to perfect such a skill, it’s worth a check. Eliot Waugh is, what, maybe five years turned?” It’s said so calmly, like Eliot is just another student, or another monster of the week to quickly be disposed of. 

Quentin really did this, he really yelled for all of his friends to hear that Eliot is back and a vampire. And feeding on him - Quentin definitely shared that part, too. Subconsciously, Quentin’s hand comes up to feel his neck, wanting to check if the bite is visible. Dean Fogg notices the movement and shakes his head in disappointment.

Fogg pulls out a crystal, and looks back and forth between it and Quentin. He doesn’t seem very pleased with what he finds.

“You are free of magical influence. Unfortunately for us, that means this situation stemmed from stupidity instead of magic.”

“Hey…” Quentin automatically defends against the insult, and, with effort, he manages to pull himself into a standing position. 

Fogg grasps the bars, fire behind his eyes. “Vampires are evil, Quentin. You’ve put yourself in danger, over what? A crush? A misplaced desire to rebel? There are easier ways to satisfy those particular urges.”

Quentin is flabbergasted for a moment, stunned that they all assume he’s just some vampire groupie. As if he would put himself or all of them in danger just to get his rocks off, as if he wasn’t cautious against the danger Margo and Eliot posed, as if he wasn’t trying to serve a greater good. 

“It’s not like that. Eliot wasn’t killing, and I got him to stop feeding on people completely. I didn’t-” Quentin wants to let himself lean against the bars, but he doesn’t want to put himself too close to the righteous anger radiating off of Fogg. “I don’t know, maybe it was stupid, but I wanted to help.”

Having it all out there is almost a relief, even though brand new anxiety is now creeping up through Quentin’s being. He doesn’t have to keep a secret anymore, but he does need to do some damage control. 

“We shouldn’t kill him. We can try to save him.”

“It’s a vampire.”

“It’s Eliot. We owe it to him to try. You know him, you taught him back in high school.”

“I taught a miserable boy with a flare for the dramatic, not a demon. This is not Eliot.”

Quentin rubs a hand over his eyes. “But it is. And it isn’t. I’m not saying that he’s completely normal, but it’s not as simple as just soulless vampire equals dead vampire.” Quentin takes a fortifying breath, head reeling. “Look I’ve been working on something, but I haven’t gotten too far because I’ve been alone. But maybe if we could all try to figure out how to restore his soul, maybe we could save Eliot. Maybe we wouldn’t have to kill him.”

Dean Fogg sighs. He stands still and straight, any anger completely drained to reveal world-weariness. Sometimes Quentin forgets how long Fogg has been in the game. “I’m afraid Miss Wicker is on the hunt right now.”

Quentin is struck. All the fear, the pain, the negotiating, talking with Eliot, it was all pointless, because now he’s dead.

“I’m sorry, Quentin, but this was never going to end any other way. You can’t rehabilitate a vampire. You can’t change a demon who doesn’t want to change.”

Dean Fogg leaves him be. He’s almost grateful for the cage - it feels suitably morose for his grieving thoughts, like it can keep all his sadness and disappointment locked inside him.

Quentin can’t believe how belly up everything ended up. It really felt like he was in control of something for once the past few weeks; he had a purpose, a goal that he thought he was succeeding in, and he was doing some kind of good with what little powers he possessed. And now, all of it was for nothing because Julia is going to kill Eliot.

Maybe it’s for the best. It’s out of his hands now, and it’ll all just be done. Eliot will be dead, and Quentin will never know if he could have changed, but at least he won’t have to deal with it anymore. 

Fuck, if Julia tries to kill Eliot, she’s going to get Margo. They think they’re going after a newbie vamp, but Margo is hundreds of years old and is not going to go down easy. It’s not just Eliot, Julia’s in danger, too.

“Hey!” Quentin yells. He bangs on the wrought-iron bars, trying to get the attention of Fogg or someone from their crew. Someone needs to know about Margo.

Quentin says, “Hello! I have vital information!”

In frustration, he kicks the bar. “Fuck, ow.” He hops backwards, shaking out his stinging foot.

“Hey,” Julia says to announce her presence, stepping into the room. 

“Julia, thank fuck, you’re okay.” Quentin’s heart feels like it leaves his throat. At least one of his friends is still safe. 

She sighs heavily. “I couldn’t go after him without at least talking to you first. Fogg isn’t happy, but he’s gonna have to deal.”

Quentin’s face feels completely open with shock and tattered hope. Everyone is still alive. He feels like he can barely focus, his mind running on the impossible loop of  _ at this moment, everyone is still alive _ . 

“Look, Q, It was pretty fucking horrible to keep this from us. You get that right?”

He nods.

“Not only was it really dangerous for our town, but it could have been dangerous for us. All of us. I don’t know what exactly you’ve been doing with him, but if you’ve told Eliot anything about my slayer duties or little details about us from school, that’s one detail too many. This all could have blown up in our faces so badly.”

Quentin’s face collapses, and it’s like all his fears from the past few weeks are finally out there in the open, and they hurt just as much coming from Julia’s mouth as they did coming from his head. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“I believe you,” Julia says.

Quentin can feel himself going numb again. She’s here, and she’s not actively killing his friend right now, but she’s going to. She’s just going to let him down gently first. He doesn’t know if he wants to give her the kindness of letting her do it easy or force her to rip off the bandaid.

“But,” And here it comes, Quentin knows she’s about to say it. “If you think there’s something worth saving in him, then maybe we can try.”

What.

“What?”

“You told Fogg you’ve been researching, and Alice is on board with helping. I think I could get Kady to help, and maybe Penny if you’re okay with him being vocal about hating it the whole time. I may not trust your judgment, but I trust your heart. I can’t promise that we’ll keep at it ‘til we succeed, but we can try.”

“Yes, please, I just want to try.”

“Okay. There’s no big demon afoot, we can give ourselves a good forty-eight hours of intense research-mode.”

Grief and pain made him numb, but relief has brought tears to his eyes. “Thank you.”

“Q, if we can’t find anything, there’s a possibility it just won’t be possible. If we can’t find him a soul, then I‘ll still have to kill him.”

“It’s Eliot.”

She looks at him shrewdly. “You really like him.”

“He’s my friend.” It comes out sounding defensive, but it’s just the truth. 

“He’s not more important than the world. Than people’s lives.”

Quentin thinks  _ he is to me _ and is shocked at himself. It’s just a moment, just a thought, but it goes against everything he thought about himself for so long. Even after the shit Eliot pulled, Quentin still cares about him so much and, if there’s a way to give him a soul, he’ll do everything he can to make sure Eliot has a shot. The amount of feeling he has for one vampire has capsized his entire life. 

“Thank you for trying, Jules.”

That’s the important part. There’s still a chance this might not end well, but they have a little more time, and a lot more resources. Quentin’s felt isolated for so long, but he doesn’t have to stay that way. They’re a team, and if there’s one thing they do well, it’s solving problems. With their help, he might actually save Eliot. 

“What are friends for? Let’s get you out of this cage.” Julia moves towards the door. “Unless you’re kinky like that, maybe I should just leave you here.”

Quentin laughs, open and free with the possibility that everyone might live. “Oh my god, just let me out.”

* * *

They research. Penny grumbles like Julia anticipated, calls Quentin a “Fucking disgrace”, but he helps. The whole team puts in the hours, and Quentin doesn’t even feel bad about being on pizza duty again.

He has hope. It’s something he hasn’t had in a long time, but he feels tentatively optimistic that things aren’t going to turn to shit. He’s really hoping his hope isn’t misplaced. 

While pulling out old stacks of anthologies from Dean Fogg’s desk with Alice, Quentin stops. “Hey, I just wanted to thank you for, you know, jumping on the save Eliot train so quickly.” Alice looks at him quizzically. “Julia told me.”

Her face looks so small and delicate, pinched in concentration as they search for anything that might be useful. 

“You’re welcome.”

They search in silence for a moment longer.

Alice puts her books down, settles herself on her knees, and turns to face him. “It’s not just about saving Eliot or doing a favor for you, though. It’s more like-” she stops for a moment, continues slower, more serious. “When all of this started, years ago, we were presented with the way the world worked. When vampires were just evil demons, it made sense why we’d stake first, ask questions later. But the second Julia told me what you were trying to do, it’s like everything flipped for me. Suddenly, all those vampires weren’t just demons. They’re trapped kids, people’s parents.” Alice’s voice wavers, and her eyes glisten. “People who might still have a chance if they have a soul.”

Alice looks away.

Quentin’s eyes go wide with the implication. “You’re thinking beyond Eliot.”

“Maybe,” Alice admits. “Depending on the solution.”

“Do you really think we could do that, give every vampire a soul?

“I have no idea. It sounds ludicrous when you say it out loud, but it would be nice to limit the amount of death we’re surrounded by, wouldn’t it?”

Quentin is struck with a moment of clarity where he realizes it’s probably really bad for him, a person struggling against the desire to die, to constantly be surrounded by reminders of death and dying. Maybe he really does need to stop patrolling in graveyards.

They get back to researching, and Quentin contemplates the reality of giving a vampire a soul. Is Eliot going to hate him for forcing a soul on him? Or, if the demon really is completely different and just inhabiting Eliot’s body, then Quentin might be dooming Eliot’s soul to an eternity shared with a demon. That thought sits horribly in Quentin’s stomach and is made worse with the thought that he might be bringing forth an Eliot that barely knows him, an Eliot that hasn’t had the chance to grow up yet. 

Quentin can’t fathom suddenly being the Quentin he was at eighteen. He’s tried to forgive his past self for just being a child and not knowing what he knows now, but he doesn’t know if that kindness would extend to himself if he actually became that teenager again.

Quentin really hopes he’s not dragging Eliot’s soul from paradise or something because he is not ready to handle the religious or moral implications of that possibility. 

Fuck it. They’re twenty-three, and Eliot was only eighteen when he died. Even if death isn’t so bad, Eliot should have the chance to rage against the dying of the light for at least a little bit longer. Quentin thinks it’s worth him getting mad at him to give him that chance. 

* * *

Alice is the one to work out the solution: there’s a questing demon in upstate New York. 

Dean Fogg is notoriously against summoning demons, so they decide to wait to tell him until they either succeed, fail, or Quentin gets eaten. Julia trades off driving with Quentin and helps him gather some of the materials, but he has to do the summoning part alone.

“I’ll be right here,” she says, standing next to the car. “If you’re not back in thirty, I’m gonna hunt me a questing demon.”

Quentin traipses down the path and feels like he’s starting his very own quest. He makes his way deeper until he gets to a section that feels different. The forest is so still around him, almost too still - the leaves aren’t falling, squirrels aren’t darting back and forth, birds aren’t calling. It’s like he didn’t notice how lively a forest could be until it just stops.

This is the place. 

He pulls his offerings around him - the candle, the lichen from a pond by the gates of hell, and the worst one of all, a true sacrifice, a pig he killed. The sight of it makes him squeamish, guilty, and guilty that squeamish is the feeling he feels the strongest of the two.

It’s time to begin the ritual.

Legs crossed, arms firmly planted at his sides, eyes closed in meditation, he begins to chant.

“ _ Adducam daemonium ad me. Dimitte me et videte quis dabit mihi quod volo. _ ”

He starts quietly, barely whispering under his breath. He pops one eye open. Hmm, nothing yet.

He chants louder, “ _ Adducam daemonium ad me, dimitte me et videte quis dabit mihi quod volo. Adducam daemonium ad me! Dimitte me et videte quis dabit mihi quod volo! _ ”

“Alright already, I heard you the first time. You don’t have to yell.”

A beautifully macabre figure steps out from behind one of the too-still trees. Her legs are too long, her eyes too wide, her cape moving over her body in such a way that it almost looks - skin-like? Quentin hopes the skin is hers.

Quentin hastily rises to his knees then stumbles to his feet. “I summoned you. You have to give me what I want.”

“That’s presumptuous. I don’t have to do anything.” She swirls her cape around her, taking a few steps towards him. She’s so tall, so horrifying, but she doesn’t look mean. She looks as if she has the skill and ability to crush him, but like she probably won’t bother.

“Please, I summoned you.”

“You did.” The beast looks at the sacrifices laid on the ground, her eyes lighting up when she takes in the dead pig. “And what is it you seek?”

“A favor for- a friend.”

“Where is this friend? Can they not give me their own sacrifice? They have to entrust someone else to do it? Or perhaps they are too cowardly to gaze upon me themselves.”

“No - he uh - he’s otherwise incapacitated.”

She takes a step forward, nostrils flaring. “You smell of death.”

“My friend, he’s a vampire. I need a soul for him.”

“A soul? Any old soul?”

“No, not just any soul. His soul. I need - he needs his soul.”

“Vampires are notoriously ungrateful for souls. Why should I give a gift that will be so underappreciated?”

Quentin has no idea if this demon cares about human lives, but it feels worth a try. “It will help people, help the world. I got him to stop - but I think he has killed people before, and this will stop him for good.”

“There’s a much easier way to stop a vampire from killing people. Are you too cowardly to simply kill such a murderer?”

And it hurts. It’s exactly what he’s been telling himself for weeks now - if he were braver, more noble, less selfish - if he had any number of good and true virtues, then he’d do exactly what he should have done the first night he met Eliot as he is now. It’s the fear that keeps him awake at night, that slips into his mind when he drifts during classes: Quentin may have blood on his hands. Eliot said he hadn’t killed anyone since they started their deal, but Quentin just doesn’t know that for certain. Quentin may not be the one doing the killing, but through his inaction, he may have sanctioned the deaths of people in his town. 

He knows he should have ended this a long time ago. It’s his weakness, but he’s not sure if a desire for mercy makes him a coward.

“You love him.” The beast states it as a fact, like his love for his friend is as steady as the trees in this forest.

“Yes.” There’s no use denying it. Quentin loves Eliot. But Eliot can’t love him, can’t love anyone to the fullest of his abilities if he doesn’t have a soul. And that, more than his own feelings, is why he’s here.

“Eliot was young, too young. His life - his human life - was stolen from him before his time.” Quentin starts to talk faster, hands moving with his words, pulse racing with adrenaline. “Sure, he’s been living it up as a vampire, but it’s not all of him. Why should he have to life a half-life if there’s something we can do to help him? Why is he doomed to the dark? He deserves to live a full life and a whole life because that life was taken from him, and I want him to have the chance to have it back.” He breathes for a moment, and says with a quieter voice, “I know he won’t just go back to being who he was before, but he also won’t be what he is now. He should have the chance to heal and become someone better.”

The beast stares, contemplative. 

“You make an interesting case. I will give you one soul.”

And that’s when Quentin remembers Margo.

Shit, he’s been so focused on Eliot, he hasn’t even thought about his sire. There’s so many ways this could go wrong if Margo isn’t on board - she could take Eliot away at the first sign of a soul, or, fuck, she might stake him. Even best case scenario Margo might just fuck off and go on a one-woman killing spree that will leave the world quaking in its boots. They could try to kill her, but Margo’s at least two hundred years old. It’s going to be much harder to finish her off than the fledglings they often take care of in a few minutes, and none of that even takes into account the clusterfuck of how Eliot might feel about his murderous sire if he has a soul.

“Wait, I have a - um- an amendment.”

The beast raises her maybe-eyebrows.

“I’m not certain you brought enough sacrifices to be making demands.”

Quentin has to think fast about how to play this. “Eliot’s soul is connected to another’s.”

The beast’s eyes light up in delight. “Soulmates?”

“Yes?” She seems down with the idea, so Quentin continues, “I mean, yes. They’re basically two souls in one, so maybe one sacrifice should be sufficient.”

The brightest, most sickening smile bursts through her face.

Quentin wants to take a step backwards, but he forces himself to plant his feet and say as confidently as he can manage, “Do we have a deal? Eliot and Margo get their souls back, and in their own bodies?”

“It is done.”

* * *

It starts as an itch. Eliot almost doesn’t notice it at first - he’s hungover and miserable and distracting himself by trying to get drunk again as quickly as possible. The itch starts from somewhere deep inside him, and by the time he notices it, it’s already spreading out through all his limbs, glowing with an ethereal light, and knocking him flat on his back.

“What the hell?”

It comes back to him.

Mike, oh god, he killed Mike, the beautiful TA who Eliot had seduced in California - or maybe Mike had seduced him - who accepted Eliot’s past when Eliot was still trying so hard to distance himself from who he had been when he was a human. Mike had stuck around for a good long while until Eliot fucked up, drank too long, and slowly then all of a sudden Mike was just gone. 

Maybe in a vague sense he knew it was wrong, knew intellectually that killing people wasn’t good, but it had felt okay at the time. He hadn’t wanted to kill Mike, but when it happened, he was more upset that his boyfriend (plaything? willing meal?) was gone than any kind of sadness over the loss of a real, human life. 

Fuck, he’d killed a lot of people. They’d decided to lay low lately, but there were a lot of years where they didn’t have those same concerns. With some he’d enjoyed it - the taste of their blood, the power that felt like his due after all the powerlessness he’d felt in life. And Margo - they’d drank from and drained so many people together, egging each other on, and, oh god, what is he going to do now if she kills anyone else.

Between Margo and his own self-sabotaging, he’s fucked everything up with Quentin. Beautiful, brave,  _ good _ Quentin, who’s been sacrificing his body for weeks to keep Eliot from drinking from anyone, only for him to throw it back in his face like it was nothing. 

His spiral of thoughts is interrupted by the sound of a loud cry from down the short hallway.

Oh no, oh no, he hopes Margo isn’t feeding on someone right now. He doesn’t know if he’d be able to handle it. Should he save them? Can he?

Eliot has to see. He gets out of bed, and makes his way down the hall. 

Even though he’s never heard Margo cry before, he recognizes the pattern of her - her breaths, the tone of her moan. Eliot quickens his steps and in moments pushes open the door. 

“Eliot?” More than the sight of her tears, or the sound of her sobs, it’s the plaintive tone to her voice that clues him in to the fact that whatever has happened, it’s happened to both of them. “Eliot,” she moans, grief lacing his name in a way he never wants to hear again.

“Bambi, I’m here.” He rushes to her, pushes her hair back from her face and cradles her head. 

“I killed them, Eliot.”

“I know,” he shushes, “I did, too.”

“I killed my-” A sob tears from Margo’s throat. “I killed my mom.”

It must have happened hundreds of years ago, but for Margo the wound is as fresh as if it happened yesterday. Eliot remembers killing his own father when he was turned, but for some reason he can’t make himself feel too badly about that. 

Eliot stares into Margo’s frenzied eyes. “You are Margo, you are wonderful, and we are going to get through this.”

“I don’t- I can’t-” Another sob wracks her small frame, and all Eliot can do is clutch her close to his chest and whisper nonsensical platitudes into her hair to comfort her in the face of two centuries of death. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm about to go on vacation, so the next updates won't be for another week or so. In the meantime, please enjoy the reunion and some thoughts about morality.

It worked. Or at least, Quentin thinks it worked. He and Julia drive back down to New Jersey to fill in the rest of the gang, and it feels like everything is about to change.

“We need to be completely sure that the souls took.” Alice is the one to propose the ritual - it’s not too complicated, but the timing is the tricky part. They can’t do it straight away, and Quentin can acknowledge that they shouldn’t let Margo and Eliot run rampant in the meantime.

Which is how he ends up leading his entire friend group to Eliot’s crypt.

It’s weird. These two worlds of his have been so separate for so long that it feels like an invasion of privacy or trust to bring them here, but they have to be sure. Quentin hopes that if it worked, if Eliot does have a soul, then he won’t mind.

He’s not sure how he’s going to feel when he sees Eliot again. He’s been trying harder than usual to save him for the past two days, but the actual last time he saw Eliot, things did not go well at all. Quentin doesn’t know if he gets to still be mad about Eliot drinking from someone (he is) or if he wants to forgive him for offering to turn him into a vampire (he does).

Quentin knocks. He doesn’t let himself in.

Eliot opens the door, and Quentin’s heart breaks. He looks just as handsome as always, but there are tired circles under his eyes, his hair slightly off in a way Quentin usually doesn’t see it. His eyes look the same. If he thought having a soul would suddenly add even more feeling behind those eyes, then he was mistaken.

“Quentin.” Eliot sounds soft, intimate, surprised. The hair on the back of Quentin’s neck stands up.

“Hey.”

Eliot’s eyes flick away, and, right, they must make quite a picture. Penny has a crossbow slung up and aimed right at Eliot’s heart, Julia has a stake, and Kady and Alice hold an axe and a spell respectively. No one wanted to take any chances - except for Quentin, that is, who’s been taking chances when it comes to Eliot since the beginning.

“Hello, little hunters,” Eliot says carefully. 

Julia is the only one who deigns to respond with a wave.

“Would you mind coming with us?” Quentin asks. “It’s just, we want to double-check to make sure the soul took-” Eliot nods, like Quentin’s confirming a theory. “-and there’s a ritual for it, but it’s a whole thing that requires a waning moon which isn’t until tomorrow, and well.”

“Is this an elaborate ploy to murder me?”

“What? No.” It takes Quentin a moment too long to realize that Eliot may have been joking.

“You should be so lucky to be murdered by us,” Julia quips.

The hint of a smile tilts up Eliot’s mouth, and he turns his attention to Julia. “Hi, slayer. Do you go by slayer? Is that an honorific or more of a job title?”

“Julia is just fine. I’d shake your hand, but...” She gestures to the stake.

“Understandable.”

Eliot goes back inside to collect Margo, and when they come back out, Quentin is struck by the sight of her.

Eliot looks tired but still pretty much the same, still acts the same. Margo, on the other hand, looks like an absolute mess. Eliot guides her out of the crypt, and her face is splotchy, unmarred by makeup, and eyes vacant. Even though Quentin has been scared of her for so long, he’s almost embarrassed for her to be seen like this, especially by the group in charge of her fate right now. 

Quentin almost wants to say hi, but he and Margo were never exactly ones to exchange pleasantries, and he’s not sure what ought to change now that she, presumably, has a soul. He opens his mouth to say something, but she cuts him off with a raised hand. She looks a little angry, a little annoyed, but most of all just exhausted. 

“Lead the way,” Eliot says.

They take Eliot and Margo back to the cage set-up they have in the basement of the psych building. Quentin’s face scrunches in apology as they lead them inside, but neither Eliot nor Margo put up much of a fuss about the barren digs. 

There are wards on the bars, so no one particularly needs to keep watch, but Quentin thinks it makes Julia feel better to keep an eye on the vampires who have been feeding off her friend. Quentin will take that as the sign of friendship it is and try not to get annoyed at the overprotectiveness. 

Even though technically they can go without blood for a few days, Quentin thinks it would be a nice gesture to offer them some pigs’ blood, so he goes to the nearest butcher’s and makes the most awkward request he’s ever had to make. On the way back, he tries to convince himself that it’s just soup he’s lugging instead of a quart of blood. 

This day has felt like it’s stretched on forever, but they still have another thirty-six hours before they can do the ritual and get out of this stasis they’re stuck in, the in-between where Eliot and Margo either have souls or don’t. Maybe it’s like Schrodinger's Cat - they both have souls and don’t have souls at the same time until Quentin lifts the lid and sees what’s inside. 

By two in the morning, most of his friends have gotten bored with the waiting game and headed home. Julia lingers, not wanting to leave Quentin alone with Eliot and Margo again, and Quentin would go home, but he doesn’t think he can sleep when he’s amped up. He did a lot today, but, in his experience, that doesn’t always mean sleep comes easily. 

Quentin enters the cage-room with two cups of blood. They’re awake, of course they are, it’s probably like afternoon-time for them. Margo is almost catatonic on one side of the cage while Eliot sits nervously on the other side. When Quentin walks in, Eliot perks up, smoothing out his pants and attempting a smile. 

“I brought blood.” Quentin lifts said blood in gesture.

Eliot’s eyes darken for a moment, and Quentin wonders if he’s thinking about drinking his blood or maybe the person he bit last, the one who got him high. Quentin doesn’t want to think about them.

Eliot takes the cup through the bars, and Quentin sets the other one down in front of Margo. She looks at it and turns away.

“How’s she doing?” He asks Eliot.

“ _ She _ is awake and can hear you. Mind your own business, Coldwater.” The look she gives him is enough to strike fear into any man’s heart, but he’s almost happy about it. Hearing her speak, even if it’s vaguely threatening, feels better than a hopeless Margo. He was starting to worry he’d broken her. 

Quieter, he reframes. “Eliot, how are you doing?”

The dim lighting casts down on Eliot, highlighting the deep divet of his chin, his jaw, his brows. Everything on him looks worn, like the weight of vampirism and now a soul make him look much older than the eighteen he’s supposed to look. Still, he wears it well.

“Honestly?”

Quentin nods and takes a seat on the ground in front of Eliot, the bars separating them.

Eliot sighs. “I feel all over the place. I can’t stop thinking about them.”

“Who?”

“The people I’ve killed.”

“Oh.” And there it is. Confirmation. Quentin knew Eliot was dangerous, that obviously he had done things, had probably killed people, but he never admitted to killing anybody in the time he’s known him. 

“We really have been trying in the last year not to kill. I never lied to you. I- Do you actually want to hear all the details?”

It may be easier not to know, but Quentin likes to walk through the world with his eyes wide open. Sometimes that causes issues for him, but he doesn’t know any other way. “Yes. Please.”

“Obviously, as a vampire, blood tastes really good, right? So drinking blood was always my prime directive, not so much the killing. Fuck, except it was, at least for awhile when I was first turned, but I got way too into it and had to stop, at least for awhile. Lately, we really haven’t been killing. It’s really inconvenient and brings a lot of heat on your back if you don’t have any connections and- you don’t want to hear all this.”

Throughout Eliot’s speech, Quentin could feel his face getting more and more disgusted. “No, I don’t particularly want to hear you make excuses for why you’ve killed people, but I probably should.”

“I’m not trying to excuse it, I’m still working through it. If you don’t want the stream of consciousness explanation of my morality, maybe you should’ve waited a few days before putting me in a cage.”

Quentin wants to roll his eyes, but doesn’t. This isn’t playful frustration Quentin’s feeling: it’s real, real frustration that Eliot can’t just already have worked past this and gotten to the part where he’s a whole and good person again. Quentin hates that he needs time to work out why he shouldn’t kill people. 

Quentin takes a steadying breath and says, “I want to hear it. Let’s figure it out.”

“Even if the conclusion is that I’m a terrible person?”

While maybe he’s not good yet, even hearing that Eliot enjoyed killing people in the past so far hasn’t been enough to truly convince Quentin that Eliot’s a terrible person, so he’s not sure what would have to happen to make that true. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

“Okay.” Any fight drains out of Eliot and he looks lost. Dejected. “Did you know I killed my dad?”

Well, fuck. “No.”

“Yeah, and I don’t feel anything about it. It was so early when I was first turned, I barely even remember it. Just that it was satisfying. It doesn’t feel as satisfying anymore, but I also don’t feel very guilty about it.”

Quentin thinks about how Eliot’s dad was a person who royally fucked up his kid, not some monster who goes bump in the night, just a human who had hopes and dreams and wounds and took them out on the beautiful person in front of him. Quentin hates Eliot’s dad and suddenly feels such deep, undeserved sympathy for him that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. 

“You don’t feel guilty. Do you feel responsible?”

“Yeah,” Eliot chokes out.

That feels like a start. 

“Quentin, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I’m trying to work out what’s right and wrong, and I just don’t know anymore. I don’t even know if it matters, if maybe as long as I don’t kill anyone then maybe it doesn’t matter what I think or feel.”

“It matters to me,” Quentin says. “I like that you’re trying.” Maybe that’s what a soul is - an opportunity. 

Eliot looks down and takes a deep steadying breath like he’s trying so hard not to just start sobbing. Quentin can relate. There’s so much emotion right under the surface, but Eliot won’t let it completely spill over, and Quentin wants to see it. Eliot pulls his knees up and rests his head sideways - it’s a sight that looks more similar to the weird theater-kid Eliot used to be more than the vampire king he’s become. 

Eliot doesn’t seem ready or willing to delve deeper, so Quentin looks around the dim room for a distraction, sees the door that leads to where Julia is probably half-asleep on a couch. “It’s weird to go from constantly being alone to now having all my friends around us all the time.”

Eliot’s lip curls in a look of simultaneous discomfort and sympathy.

Quentin continues, “Part of me almost wishes we could just go back to your crypt and do our usual blood thing.”

“This is better.”

Quentin tilts his head in question.

“Even without the blood, in a weird cage waiting for my judgment, I’d rather be here with you like this.”

Eliot closes his eyes, like it’s just too much to look at him while talking about how much he values Quentin. It’s feels big between them. They’ve both seen each other at their worst, their most pathetic, and they’re still here. Quentin’s a little amazed he still wants to be here. 

“Look, Quentin, I don’t know if I can thank you for this - I’ve never been the best at introspection, and this gives me way too much to think about and come to terms with - but I am happy to be a… fuller version of myself. And I’m happy that we’re on more even ground, I can see that now.”

“I’m happy about that, too.” Quentin gestures into the air. “Although, that’s probably obvious since I did this to you.”

“It’s nice to hear.”

Quentin looks at the morose beauty of Eliot. He doesn’t want to be anywhere else. 

“Can I stay with you?” Quentin murmurs.

Baffled, sad affection shines on Eliot’s face. “Only if you want to.”

Quentin leans back against the wall and reaches out through the bars. Eliot looks at his hand, hesitating a moment before grasping it tight. His hand is still dead cold, but Quentin feels the life underneath.


	10. Chapter 10

By the time they do the ritual, it feels more like a technicality. They get their answer though: Margo and Eliot are now both in possession of souls. 

After a brief fight, everyone agrees to let Margo and Eliot go. They can’t exactly keep them for no reason and, with their souls and a promise not to go off killing anybody, Julia and Alice at least seem convinced that they’re no longer threats.

“Rest assured, soul or no soul,” Dean Fogg says, cold fire burning in his eyes, “If you even look at an artery, the full force of the Watcher’s Council and slayer will reign down on you. ”

“Yes, Henry,” Eliot allows.

Dean Fogg narrows his eyes at the first name, and Quentin has a vague memory of Eliot refusing to call him Mr. Fogg even when he was their high school teacher instead of their Dean. 

Before heading out, Eliot envelopes Quentin in a tight hug, and Quentin feels something in his chest unwind at the contact. Eliot’s big hands clutch his head to his chest for a moment, but it’s gone just as quickly as it started, and while Quentin is happy that his friends didn’t have to witness him crying into a vampire’s chest, that’s all he wants to do now that the crisis has been officially dealt with. 

“You’ll come visit me?” It sounds like Eliot tries to phrase it like a command, but there’s too much vulnerability peaking through. 

“Yeah, of course.”

Quentin should be thrilled. And he is happy to have Eliot ensouled, his secret out, his friends backing him. Everything should be perfect, hell, even Dean Fogg isn’t that mad at him anymore. But something inside Quentin still feels off. 

He goes home and has the first shower he’s had in days and tries to get hype about sleeping in his own bed again. Instead, he ends up crying in the shower. 

He calms down, towels off, and tries to eat something. He ends up crying into his cereal bowl. 

He doesn’t even try to get into bed, assuming that the soft sheets will trigger another crying spell.

_ What’s wrong with me? _ It’s a hopeless and unproductive thought, but Quentin just feels shitty. And the fact that everything is actually fine now makes him feel shittier. 

Fuck it, Quentin’s not helpless. He just successfully petitioned a demon and saved his friends. He can handle some untoward emotions. 

So Quentin does what a million therapists have asked him to do: he journals, and he thinks, and he breathes.

He starts with the easy thing: he still feels hopeless. Everything is fine, but it still kind of feels like anything bad could happen at the drop of a hat. He tries to tell himself _ you’re fine, you’re fine, it’s all fine now, _but denying his feelings has never made them just go away, so he changes tactics. 

Why does he feel hopeless? Because he feels useless.

That thought makes him start ugly crying again. He wipes his eyes, blows his nose, and keeps writing. 

Okay, time for some rational, philosophical thought. He feels useless, but is he useless? A little bit, sure. Now that Eliot is ensouled, he at least doesn’t have to examine his many unethical decisions with regards to that problem, but beyond that whole situation he still feels unmoored. He’s not depressed enough to think he doesn’t have any skills at all, but not many of them are combat ready. He’s about to graduate, and he feels like he’s barely improved since Julia was first called in high school: he can punch an unskilled vampire and throw Julia tools when he needs to, can whack a demon as a distraction, but anything more treacherous with a vampire older than five and he’s out of his league.

If Quentin is honest with himself, maybe he’s been assuming that just because he’s a guy that he would be able to take on vampires with his very basic, wholly adequate skills by now. It’s not enough. 

And here’s the kicker: does he have to stay useless?

Quentin takes a deep, shaky breath as he focuses his mind on finding a solution.

He thinks about what Eliot offered when he didn’t have a soul. If Quentin became a vampire, he would have super strength and plenty of skills that might help in a fight. But there are so many costs of being a vampire, and the slight benefit doesn’t outweigh them.

Vampirism would just be a finger in the dam, an easy solution to a long-standing problem.

So if he can’t go for the easy answer, how about a hard answer.

What if he actually learns to fight?

Kady’s human. Kady lived a weird and traumatizing life that led her to seek out the skills she has, but at the end of the day, Kady is human. She’s human, but she’s still useful.

Maybe Quentin can do that.

* * *

Even with a plan, sleep is fretful and elusive, but passable that night. He wakes up with quite a few things on his to-do list: convince Kady to train him, try to give Eliot and Margo some space, and attempt to actually study for finals. He’s cautiously optimistic he’ll be able to do all three.

Quentin finds Kady in the gym punching a bag, hair sticking to her neck and energy wild. Julia fights like she’s rewriting the rules of combat; Kady fights like she learned the rules and said fuck it. 

“Hey,” Quentin says.

He would think maybe she didn’t hear him with her headphones in, but she definitely glances at him and just decides to finish until deigning to respond. 

Kady ends her set, steadies the bag, and asks, “What’s up?” She looks at him shrewdly. “You don’t need another soul for another demon-boyfriend, do you? I draw the line at one summoning per year.”

Quentin glances around. “Noted.”

She gives him a moment to bring up his point, but when he doesn’t get to it fast enough she prompts, “You have to actually speak, Quentin. My heart rate drops in five, we’re on a time crunch. What do you need?”

“Maybe I just want to hang out?”

“Sweet, but you’re too twitchy for that. Spill.”

Once the words come, they come plainly. “Will you train me?”

Kady looks at him in disbelief. “Like a practice session? You wanna learn a couple moves?”

“No, I want you to actually, legitimately train me. Like you did.”

Quentin is serious about this, and he hopes Kady can see that. 

“Can’t Julia do this?”

“You’re human.” Kady is human, so she understands his limits. Julia may be his best friend, but he feels like trying to learn how to fight from someone who was suddenly bequeathed with strength and killer instincts would lead to even more resentment and frustration. No, this is better. 

“I meditated for years, ran through drills constantly and trained under masters,” Kady explains, like she’s letting him down easy.

“You’re basically a master.”

She gives a derisive snort, “Not like them. I can teach you some things, but I can’t turn you into a warrior. You can’t just suddenly know how to fight, you have to work for it.”

“I’m not-” He lets out a noise of frustration. “Look, just because it’s hard doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.”

Kady stares at him, assessing him, looking for something that Quentin doesn’t know he can give her, but he can give her his resolve. He stares back. “I want to do this.”

“Fine.” She rolls her eyes, and it’s not the most welcome start to a life of purpose, but it’s what he’s got. “You at least know how to meditate, right?”

“Yeah.” He’s had enough therapy to become familiar with the process.

“Step one: meditate every day. Start small if you want, but you should be giving it at least thirty minutes.”

Honestly, the amount of attention that is going to take is making him instantly regret this plan, but he pushes through. “I can do that.”

Kady stares at him like she doesn’t believe him, but moves on. “We can start training next week, I’m swamped right now.”

“Awesome, cool.” He backs away, almost bumping into a weight machine. “Can’t wait to get my ass kicked in a week.”

Kady’s laugh breaks out of her mouth. “At least you’re not delusional.”

“I can assure you, I have a firm grip on reality.”

“I wouldn’t go around saying things like that given the company you’ve been keeping. Get lost, Julia’s meeting me in ten.”

Quentin holds his hands up in supplication, and makes his retreat. Quentin feels hopeful about his own future for the first time in awhile. He has a plan, a goal, a way to be useful to his friends and their cause. With a quest on his shoulders, no matter how difficult it may be, he feels like he could do anything.

* * *

Quentin sticks to his decision to give Eliot some space to figure the soul thing out. And anyway, Quentin has a new project, one far less likely to get him murdered, to focus on. For the next week, in between studying for finals, Quentin carves out time every day to meditate. It’s for training, but it also feels like it’s been really helpful for his state of mind. 

Kady meets with him like she promised. They start simple, hand to hand, but it still whips his ass. He leaves sweaty and sore, the amount of physical activity and endurance level required for sustained training far more than he would have anticipated, but he can’t even bring himself to feel bad about it. For all her bolstering, Kady is actually a really good teacher, and Quentin mostly just feels silly that he never asked for this before.

It’s on one such night when he’s on his way home from training - sweaty hair still sticking to the back of his neck because the showers at their college gym feel like a no-man’s land - that he runs into Margo. Seeing her suddenly pop out in front of him sends a rush of cold fear through his veins, his heart stuttering on a stop. She’s got a soul now, and even though Quentin knows she’s not the most dangerous thing anymore, she still feels dangerous. It’s still early in his trek home, so for once she hasn’t surprised him in a graveyard - the street is actually pretty busy at this early hour - and Quentin has a moment to wonder if that’s intentional. 

“Hi,” Margo opens. A much simpler phrase than the performative descriptions he’s heard from her in the past. 

“Oh, hi.”

“Can I buy you coffee?”

His instinct is to say no. He’s a little sick of being lured to secondary locations by vampires. But the night is young, there are still so many people around, and Quentin wants to help. If something is going wrong with Margo, or she’s having a crisis of conscience, Quentin would rather she talk to a human like him about it before going off and ripping someone’s head off. 

“Um, sure, okay.”

The cafe is only a block away, and Margo is dead silent the whole time. 

Quentin settles on tea - he’d prefer coffee, but his sleep schedule is fucked enough as it is and he doesn’t need nighttime caffeine doing him a disservice. Margo pays.

Margo sits so still across from him, hands folded neatly, eyes fixed on a random spot on the table. She looks otherworldly - Quentin doesn’t even know if he can see her breathe.

“How’s the crypt?” Quentin attempts.

Margo grunts and waves the idea away, like the idea of small talk is uninteresting or just too much right now. Quentin quiets and lets her work up to whatever it is she’s going to say.

Her intense gaze settles on him. “I vowed a long time ago to never apologize for hedonism. The world will never forgive a woman for that, so why bother caring about it, you know? But I’ve been doing a lot of recontextualizing with my new soul, and, well, did I fuck up? Did you like the bite?”

Quentin hisses a breath in. “It was fine.” It comes out automatically before he can think. Margo is giving him the perfect opening, but that innate desire not to ruffle feathers and upset an old vampire is still there.

She stares at him, and there’s something off putting and ethereal about it, like she’s looking right through him. He’s not sure how much of that is from being a vampire or just being Margo.

“Okay, no, it felt pretty awful.” It’s probably an understatement, but it’s the only way he knows how to phrase it. How can he describe how unsafe he felt? How guilty? It all feels like so much noise now, he doesn’t really know if he’s processed it enough for himself, let alone for her. 

Margo sighs. “Well, shit.” 

Quentin crosses his arms over his chest. 

Margo asks, “Should I apologize?”

“No offense, but I don’t know if you get to yet? Like, you only just realized it was wrong.”

“Yeah, okay.”

If there’s anything he can get out of this conversation, maybe it’s answers. He hasn’t started processing, and he doesn’t think he can accept an apology yet, but maybe he can get some details to help him understand it better.

“Did you know? About the no-neck thing?”

“Yeah, Quentin, I knew.”

Quentin nods. So it wasn’t just a mistake. She knew about his boundary, and she drove right on past it.

Quentin doesn’t know if he needs to know anything beyond that, doesn’t think he has any nagging questions. He doesn’t even really need to ask why; he knows why, knows that she’s a vampire and a hedonist and didn’t have a soul to stop her from taking what she wanted. All of a sudden he’s struck with the need to make sure she knows how he feels.

“It really fucking sucked, Margo.” She sits and listens. Her eyes are wide, and Quentin thinks he gets why Eliot calls her Bambi now. “It hurt, and I didn’t have any time to process what was happening, and suddenly my body was too into it and it was still just happening. I felt so shitty, and then terrible for feeling so shitty. And just really unsafe. Kind of fucking powerless.”

She bears witness to the whole thing, and he thinks it’s probably a good sign that the soul is working that she’s tearing up a bit. 

Sounding like she’s taking empathy out for a test-drive, Margo says, “You know you didn’t, like, deserve what I did to you.”

“Obviously,” Quentin mutters, but hearing it makes him want to cry. 

“You care a lot, and that’s inspiring.” She raps her knuckles against the table, like maybe she was going to reach out and touch him but decided against it. “I hope one day I can earn the right to say I’m sorry.” 

It almost sounds like an apology in and of itself. It feels like a start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Margo and Quentin’s conversation stems from concepts about restorative justice. It’s still Margo, and it’s still Quentin, so not everything is perfect (you’d never impromptu do this, everything is super planned out with a victim/perpetrator meeting, and of course human predators don’t get an easy moral pass by suddenly developing a conscience), but I wanted to try to get them past the bite in a real way. Some of the aspects of restorative justice that I used include the idea that the perpetrator has to earn the right to apologize, having a victim impact statement, and - it’s not so much here but will be touched on later - making amends with the community/victim. There’s definitely a lot of debate about if restorative justice can work for a crime like sexual assault, but I figured what safer place to think about it than a situation where we’re dealing with allegories.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe this is the end! Please note that I've changed the rating to Explicit for this chapter.

For Quentin’s last final, he has to write an essay arguing for one of the schools of normative ethics. For a long time, he’s stuck between deciding on virtue ethics or consequentialism. The irony is not lost on him. 

But he makes it through to the other side of the semester, and he can breathe again. 

He’s walking back from campus when he feels an arm slide through his. “Hey, Q.”

“Julia.”

“We’re done! One semester down, one more to go.”

“Oh my god, please stop reminding me.”

“Come now, Martin,” Julia affects her best Jane Chatwin accent. “We have to study hard if we’re going to Fillory in the summer.”

“Of course, Jane.” Quentin doesn’t even attempt the accent.

“You know, even though finals are over, I don’t think Alice has left the library once today.”

Quentin looks at Julia in question. 

“She’s looking into different ways to give vampires souls or maybe neuter them. Demon summoning worked well enough this time, but it’s not really a long-term viable solution, you know?”

“Oh shit, should I be helping with that?” Quentin’s been so focused on his finals and the state of Eliot and Margo that he kind of forgot about Alice’s idea. 

“Nah, she’s being kind of lone wolf about it. And don’t worry: you prompted the idea, your work here can be done.”

He supposes maybe he should listen and let someone else pick up the baton. 

“How’s training?” Julia nudges him. “I hear Kady’s a good teacher.”

“Kicking my ass.” He hasn’t been this bruised since he was a kid. “But it’s good. It’s really good.”

“Q.” She pulls on his arm, stopping him. “You know you don’t have to do this, right? You don’t have to become a trained fighter to be important.”

“Yes, I do.” Julia’s never understood the specific brand of powerlessness he’s felt - the desire to help but being unable to actually do it. After their fight weeks ago, he thinks he might understand that there is a certain amount of powerlessness Julia must also feel about her friends and how she can’t protect all of them. But that’s exactly why he needs to stick with this: for himself, and for her, to make it so she doesn’t have to worry about him. 

She rubs his arm where they’re still linked. “You’re my best friend.”

“You’re mine, too.”

“You’ve always been important to me. And to this fight. Even without powers or some special skill set you think you should have, you’ve always been essential.”

Months ago, he thinks he might have just dismissed that out of hand, taken it as just meaningless words meant to placate him. Now, he tries to take it in. He can see Julia, see how intensely she looks at him, the care and resolve in her eyes. Sometimes Quentin interprets that as pity, but not right now. All he sees is love.

“Thank you,” Quentin says. 

He’s still going to do it, he still wants to train and become better, but maybe it doesn’t have to be a way to fix him. Maybe it can just be another thing he does to help people.

She nods, pauses, then seems to come to a decision. “Come here.”

“What?”

Julia gestures towards him. “Hug me, you’re gonna feel your worth.”

Quentin laughs and opens his arms. Julia wraps her arms around him close and tight, squeezing with - thankfully - her human strength. 

“You are so special to me,” she mumbles against his shoulder.

He thinks maybe he doesn’t let her know that he feels just the same about her enough. “Julia, you are too. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

* * *

Perhaps somebody might say that giving Eliot space has turned into avoiding Eliot. Quentin doesn’t think he’d go so far as admitting that, but he can see it. 

Come to think of it, it’s possible that Eliot might be avoiding him a little bit, too. There are only so many places to be in this town, and Quentin is a creature of habit - if Eliot wanted to find him, he could have. 

Quentin’s not even really mad anymore. No, something even worse has crept up in its place: wanting. Quentin wants Eliot. Wants to see him, wants to talk to him, wants to pick his brain about every new vestige of morality he dredges up from his new soul. He wants to look at him, touch him. As someone dealing with the consistent thrum of depression and ennui, wanting doesn’t always come easily to Quentin, so when it takes hold, he feels like he can’t say no to it. 

Which leads him to Eliot’s door.

He knocks loudly, still not back to that stage they were where he could just bound in across the threshold. 

“Quentin.” Every time Eliot says his name it’s like he thought he’d never see him again.

“Hey.” 

Eliot looks so tentative. His eyes are open and fond, his back still just as straight as always, but there’s an air of unsettledness to him, like he’s on the edge of waiting for something. 

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Quentin asks. 

“God, yes.” 

They make their way through the gravestones - fallen twigs from large barren trees lining their path - until they come to the graveyard’s entrance. They step out into the light of the streetlamps. Quentin wants to hold Eliot’s hand, but walking, moving forward is better. 

Quentin tries to start light. “Um, have you been mostly brooding, or have you had any time to watch anything new?”

Eliot lets out a breath at the break in the tension, a quirk he’s kept from human life. “No, my attention span has been pretty shitty the past few weeks.”

“Oh yeah, me too. Or well, not my attention span, that’s actually been good - I just finished my last final - but I haven’t had time to get into anything new either. Is what I meant.”

Quentin grimaces at his own nonsense, but when he looks over, Eliot is trying to hide a smile. 

Quentin feels so drawn to Eliot. He wants to stay in his orbit, and he wants to just let him take care of him and take away his burden for awhile. But it feels like he’s still the same person he was before he got a soul, which means his actions have to have some kind of bearing on now. And before he got a soul, his actions were actually frustrating to a hellish degree. 

“Can I ask what was up with you?”

Eliot scrunches his face in thought and eventually decides on “You’re gonna have to be more specific than that.”

“Before I - you know - ensouled you, you were kind of off the rails.”

Eliot sighs. “Please don’t make me examine that. Can we just leave it at  _ I’m a fuck up _ and move on?”

“No? That way feels like it leads to repeated mistakes.” Quentin leaves his body open, arms at his sides, and says, not unkindly, “Also, I’m still kind of pissed at you.”

Eliot scrunches his nose in disgust, but his features eventually smooth into a more thoughtful visage. “Things were really good. Too good.”

Quentin hopes Eliot knows that that statement is in no way enough to completely explain his actions. He stays silent, letting Eliot work through it.

Eliot clarifies, “Things were going so well that it felt like it had to end eventually. And then after that thing with Margo-” The reminder makes Quentin flinch. “-I was convinced you hated us and just, I don’t know, figured I’d wedge the knife in further. When things get hard, I tend to … run away.”

Quentin almost wants to laugh at the incredible frustrating beauty of that amount of destruction just because Eliot was afraid. The utter neuroticism makes him want to yell at Eliot until he gets his shit together, but at the same time it’s  _ Eliot _ . He feels such a kindness towards him that even in this, he feels like he gets it. He cherishes that Eliot could look inside and at least see why he acted the way that he did.

Quentin hedges, “Promise me, if you get the urge to self-sabotage in the future, can you at least not bite anyone?”

“Yes, definitely. With this spanking new soul that feels very doable.”

Quentin smiles and glances over at Eliot just in time to see him turn away with a smile of his own. 

Quentin feels brave. He feels hopeful and good and all manner of adjectives that lead him to reaching out and holding Eliot’s hand. There’s nothing particularly subtle about it; it’s not a light graze of each other’s hands and Quentin can’t even bring himself to look away from where they’re joined. Eliot’s fingers grasp him back sure and strong, long fingers tangling with Quentin’s own slightly shorter but no less girthy hands. He thinks they look good together. 

“Have you thought more about your soul? Or like, your morality?”

“So many questions,” Eliot says softy. 

“I want to know where you stand.” Sure, as a philosophy major, Quentin is curious, but it also feels important to Quentin that he knows where Eliot is. It feels like he’s on the cusp of something, or they both are. Quentin wants to know everything about Eliot, wants to dig around his insides until he knows him completely.

“Are you familiar with Catholicism?”

“Vaguely?”

“Catholic guilt?”

“That I feel like I might have a better handle on.”

“I dropped Catholic asceticism in favor of hedonism when I was maybe fourteen, but now that my soul is back, it’s like that same struggle is creeping back. I have to reexamine all my desires and figure out if it’s actually bad-bad or just normal amounts of homoerotic sinfulness.” 

Every time they were together in Eliot’s room, it felt like Eliot was crowding his space, trying to get closer and closer to him. Now, even after stating his struggle so plainly, he doesn’t reach for Quentin, doesn’t do more than just keep his hand in Quentin’s. Resolve builds, and Quentin vows to show Eliot that he still wants to touch him, comfort him no matter what his desires may be. The initial approach feels a little awkward, but Quentin wraps his arms around Eliot. Eliot freezes for only a second before clutching his arms so securely around Quentin’s frame that he thinks he could get lost in it. 

“What kinds of desires?” Quentin asks, face pressed close to Eliot’s chest. 

“I want-” Eliot swallows. “I want to bite you.”

Quentin rubs a hand along his back. “We can’t do that anymore.”

“I know. I- I know.” 

“What else do you want?” Quentin pushes. 

The silence grows between them long enough that Quentin almost regrets asking. 

Eliot whispers, stilted, “You know. You have to know.” It’s not coy, it’s pleading, like he’s begging Quentin not to make him say it. 

Quentin’s felt something building inside him for awhile now, always knew that somehow Eliot was important, but the particulars were never quite there. He’s so beautiful. And Quentin just wants to wrap him in his arms and try. He thinks they deserve that.

“I do know,” Quentin affirms, says it with kindness.

He moves as he decides to do it. Awkwardness infects him and he can’t decide for a moment if he needs to go on tiptoes or Eliot needs to come down, but he pulls back, places a hand on Eliot’s arm and  _ tugs.  _ A look of hopeful disbelief plays across Eliot’s eyes and then he leans down to let himself be kissed.

It’s good. Kissing Eliot is so good. There’s such a natural chemistry there; Quentin doesn’t know if he’s ever kissed someone and thought immediately that their mouth just tasted good. Eliot’s lips and tongue and everything feel right, and Quentin’s heart races at the newness of it all.

Quentin’s hands wrap around Eliot’s back, pulling closer, trying to line them up, but Eliot’s just so damn tall. Quentin’s neck is craning and his feet are scrambling against the ground as he tries to press himself taller, anything to get closer.

He breaks away, suddenly self-conscious at the fact that they’re outside, and wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his hoodie.

“Whoa.”

“Yeah.”

Quentin’s heart is racing so fast he’s almost trembling. He can’t believe he’s actually doing this. He could leave it here. He could go home, overthink all of it, and convince himself that it’s too much.

“Um, hey, do you wanna come back to my place?”

Eliot’s eyes widen at the implication. “You- really?”

“Yeah,” Quentin huffs out. “I want to invite you in.”

It’s a level of trust that Quentin doesn’t know if Eliot quite deserves just yet, but he’d rather him rise to meet it than wait too long.

“Yes, I want that.”

“Okay, yeah, great.”

They barely brush hands again as they make the walk to Quentin’s apartment. His nerves are on edge and there’s a hot pool of desire curling low in Quentin’s belly. 

Quentin unlocks the door and steps over the threshold. He turns back, remembers himself and says, “Do I need to maybe formally invite you in?” 

“Couldn’t hurt,” Eliot allows.

“Eliot, I invite you in.” Quentin gestures an arm out in welcome.

Eliot takes an overly large step into his apartment. He’s really here, in his space, in his safe zone. Quentin’s let him in.

“Your place is...nice.”

Quentin glances around, seeing his apartment with the eyes of a guest. His eyes go first to the coffee table littered with books from his last minute editing, the packages of tea and microwave dinners still left on his counter space. There’s still a box of things shoved in the corner that his dad thought he might need for school, and he never quite got around to putting up all his posters. He suddenly he wishes he had candles to create the same ambience Eliot made so often in his crypt.

“Yeah, nice.”

Eliot places a hand on his shoulder. “It’s fine, it just doesn’t look very settled.”

Quentin breathes in the contact and clutches a hand on top of Eliot’s, rubbing a finger over the back of it. “No, yeah, I get it.”

“Did you just move in?”

“Um, no I’ve been here two years.”

“Quentin-” Anything else is caught in Eliot’s throat. Quentin turns to look at him and can see how seriously Eliot is taking them. Deep inside, he might have been a little worried that this would just be the culmination of weeks of heat and blood drinking between them, but instead it feels real, weighty. 

“I know.” 

Eliot moves his hand from Quentin’s shoulder to the back of his neck. Now that they’re here, in private, he hesitates for a moment more before leaning in for the kiss. Quentin lets his lips play against Eliot’s. He soaks in the feeling of it, Eliot’s body so close and hand pressing gentle but insistent on the back of his neck. Eliot moves him back towards Quentin’s lumpy couch -Quentin hasn’t even had the chance to turn the lights on yet, but he guesses it doesn’t even matter with Eliot’s vampire sight - and Eliot guides Quentin down. They make out, Quentin in Eliot’s lap, and the angle is much easier on Quentin’s straining neck. It’s better, it’s good, it’s good.

Eliot pulls back, and Quentin barely opens his eyes. Eliot’s lips are kiss-red and eyes are full of awe. He runs a hand through Quentin’s hair and whispers, “You-”

Quentin has never seen Eliot look this stripped before, and it’s just from kissing. Quentin isn’t a performer and can’t act to save his life, not like Eliot. The crux of who Eliot is isn’t a lie, but it is often an act, a certain kind of performance. Quentin appreciates the performance, but he also appreciates Eliot without any bells and whistles, the soft, ugly banality of him. He gets the feeling Eliot thinks he has to be a suave seductive vampire for him, but Quentin would take him if he just wanted to lay back and accept everything Quentin wants to give him. 

“Kiss me,” Quentin gently directs. Eliot obliges.

Quentin should be fine with just making out, on another night he thinks maybe he would be, but, right now, all he can think about is how it felt to be bitten in Eliot’s arms, all the times he felt the stirrings of desire and pushed it down or compartmentalized it. Now it’s here in full force.

“I want-” Quentin whispers against Eliot’s lips. He runs a hand down Eliot’s chest, brushing over his nipples through his shirt with intent. Eliot gasps against him - surprise and arousal warring in his voice. 

It feels delicate between them, like anything might break this moment. But to get anywhere new, you have to risk something. 

Eliot’s hands - previously grabby but respectfully staying above the waist- move down to grab Quentin’s ass and hoist him closer. Quentin moves his hips with Eliot, grinding down on him. He slides a hand between them to cup Eliot’s cock through his pants, and the first touch of him sends a lightning bolt of desire through Quentin’s core.

He works his palm against Eliot, but then has a completely inappropriate thought that makes him laugh.

“What?” Eliot asks, eyes wide and glassy when he pulls back.

“Nothing, I just- I was kind of wondering if vampires were like Anne Rice vampires, but I guess now I have my answer.”

Eliot looks at him quizzically and - okay, Quentin guesses for a vampire he must not be up to date on his vampire literature. 

“You can get hard,” Quentin clarifies. 

There’s a moment where Quentin thinks maybe he’s ruined everything and Eliot just stares at him until his face breaks open. Suddenly they’re both laughing together even with Quentin’s hand still shoved between them on Eliot’s cock.

“Quentin.” Eliot sounds half wild, half pleading. “Was that not relevant to you before deciding to have sex with me?”

“What? Of course not. As long as you’re into it.”

Eliot looks at him so fondly. Quentin can feel a little smile curve on his lips at the attention. 

“Do you wanna see how hard I can get? Wanna suck me?”

Quentin lets out a rush of air at that possibility. The thing is that he does want that, he really wants to get his mouth on Eliot, but he also doesn’t want to be that far away from him. It feels like even being halfway down Eliot’s body is too far. 

“That is… so hot. But I think I’d rather touch you like this.” Quentin slides his hand inside Eliot’s pants, cupping him skin-to-skin, and Eliot lets out a groan.

“That’s good, too. Can I suck you off?”

“Eliot.” Quentin’s other hand clutches Eliot’s face. Eliot’s eyes are hooded in pleasure as Quentin strokes over his cock, but his focus is all on him. “Just be here. With me.”

Eliot nods.

Eliot can’t keep his hands off of him. The whole time that Quentin is stroking him, working his hard cock, Eliot is sliding his hands under his pants, under the back of his shirt. He clutches Quentin’s shoulders to hold him even closer - it makes the angle weird for Quentin’s wrist, so eventually he has to stop in favor of just grinding down against each other. 

“Quentin,” Eliot moans against his shoulder.

“C’mon, I want to feel you.”

Quentin gets them up off his couch and into his bedroom. He actually managed to put some posters up in here when he first moved in, a bookshelf shoved full in the corner, so it feels a little homier. He slides his own t-shirt off without much fanfare, and when he glances back, Eliot is eyeing him up hungrily.

Eliot unbuttons his own top, letting the fabric of it drape over a chair. Quentin can’t take it, all that pale skin finally exposed to him in the dark of his bedroom. He latches his mouth on Eliot’s neck to suck a hickey while he roams his fingers through his chest hair, over his ribs. Everything feels new. 

Eliot whines at a particularly harsh suck, and Quentin lets himself use a little more teeth as Eliot clutches his head close. 

Eliot runs his fingers through Quentin’s hair and yanks him back and off. The sudden sting of it sends a shiver down Quentin’s spine that punches out a harsh moan from his gut. 

Eliot runs a finger over the front of Quentin’s ear. “Quentin, please, just take your pants off.” 

Quentin unbuckles his jeans while Eliot finally removes his own. With a final pause of uncertainty to wonder if they’ve reached this point of the night yet, Quentin decides to take off his boxers, too.

And then it’s just Quentin and Eliot. Bare, open, naked in the dim room lit only by street lamps. Eliot’s eyes are worshipful and open, and Quentin assumes he looks similarly gobsmacked. 

Quentin hops back onto his bed, and Eliot follows. He presses him down, kissing him deep and wet, and the first slide of their naked bodies against each other feels so good. Eliot nuzzles down from his mouth to his neck, the joining of neck and shoulder. He kisses him lightly, then sucks a bruise there like Quentin did. He only sucks, doesn’t bite. What two weeks ago would have been exhilarating in a scary way, now feels secure and arousing. Quentin trusts that Eliot’s not going to bite him, that he’s here.

Quentin thrusts his hips up against him, and their cocks slide together. It’s so good, and Quentin knows it’s going to be enough - eventually. It’s frantic, but he also feels like they have all the time in the world for this. They kiss and make out, and their pleasure plateaus and almost peaks, and sometimes Eliot laughs or Quentin bumps his head against the headboard, but it’s good. And they grind against each other until Quentin comes, and then Eliot only needs a hand for a little while longer to join him. 

Eliot rolls to the side, and Quentin breathes. He did it. Everything with Eliot and their deal and lying to his friends and summoning a demon led him here. If this is the reward, Quentin doesn’t know if he’d do anything differently.

Quentin rolls over to follow him, tucking himself into his side.

Eliot holds his neck and presses a kiss to his sweaty forehead. “You look good there.”

“I’m comfortable.”

Quentin hides a smile against his chest. 

“You’re amazing.” Eliot whispers. “You really are.”

Quentin plays a hand over his chest, trying to soak in the afterglow before his brain kickstarts.

“I know it’s kind of late, but are you even tired?”

Eliot shakes his head. “No, this is like mid-day for me. Why? Are you thinking of round two?”

“I wasn’t, but sure, just give me a minute. Or twenty.”

“I have a lot to teach you about vampire stamina.”

The thought of Eliot fucking him for hours sends a hot little thrill of excitement through his body that can barely settle in his softened cock.

Eliot teases, “You like that.”

Quentin’s brows furrow. “How can you tell?”

“Your heart rate picked up. So either you liked it or it scared you. I’m feeling optimistic after a hell of an orgasm so I chose the nicer interpretation.”

Quentin also experienced a hell of an orgasm, so he’s feeling bold. “You don’t think I’m scared by your massive cock and vampire stamina?”

Eliot lets out a groan at that wording. “No, I don’t. You like me and my massive cock.”

“That’s true.”

They lay in bed. Quentin actually thinks he might be able to fall asleep soon, but Eliot feels wide awake underneath him. He has no idea if watching people sleep is a vampire activity. 

“What are you gonna do after college? It’s coming to an end, right?”

Quentin strokes a finger along Eliot’s ribs, keeps his voice light. “Must you ruin the afterglow with talk of the future?”

“You don’t have to answer.”

Quentin sighs. “I guess I just assumed I’d keep doing school. I’m good at it.”

“You know, you can go to school anywhere in the world.”

“I only speak English and some passable Latin and Ancient Sumerian. I cannot go to school anywhere in the world.”

Eliot’s fingers in his hair get surer and his legs tangle closer. “All I’m saying is that you have options. There’s more to life than this town. Hell, there are even other hellmouths out there if you want to stick to slaying.”

Quentin knows about those, but he doesn’t particularly want to go to grad school in Cleveland.

“I don’t know. What about you? You’ve got even more of a life than I do to figure out. What are you gonna do?”

“Actually-” Quentin suddenly remembers weeks ago Eliot talking about Barcelona, remembers Eliot and Margo’s plans to fuck off and vacation around the world. “-Margo and I have been talking about what to do. I think we’ve finally decided on an apology tour.” That gives Quentin pause.

“An apology tour?”

Eliot’s voice sounds a little shaky, a little unsure, like this is a big deal that he’s trying to make sound like it’s just another thing they’re doing. “Yeah, I know I’ve mentioned the horrible things we’ve done, but um, it’s starting to hit that we did those things to real, actual people? Some of whom might still have descendants or family who could use some help.”

Eliot pulls Quentin closer. That little pit of curiosity that always comes alive when Eliot talks about anything to do with his morality or past deeds grows in Quentin’s stomach.

Eliot murmurs, “I think we’re gonna start in India. Margo thinks she might be able to find the village she’s from. And we’ll see what we can do.’

“Do you think it’ll be enough?”

Eliot lets out a mirthless laugh. “I don’t know. It has to be, right? It’s at least worth trying.”

Quentin is so lost in his own thoughts about morality and the logistics of trying to track down generations of people you happened to murder three-hundred years ago, that he almost doesn’t hear it. 

“Come with us?”

Quentin’s brain just stops. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“I think it’s one of the only good ideas I’ve had in awhile.”

Quentin considers it. Logistically, it sounds like a nightmare. He has no idea how vampires travel on their own let alone with a human. What will any of them eat? He doesn’t particularly want to play snack again for the foreseeable future, and he’s worried about all the languages he doesn’t speak and the social skills he doesn’t have. But, ultimately, it comes down to this: Can he trust Eliot and Margo enough to traipse off around the globe with them? Does he want to? He thinks he might. 

Eliot continues, “You can keep training, and we can help people. It could just be for winter break if you want.” Quentin thinks he might hear a please somewhere in there. 

“Eliot, I want to, but how…”

“Fuck  _ how _ .” It should be harsh, but it sounds so gentle. Eliot is being so gentle with him. “We’ll figure it out. Doing this is important, but I want to be with you.”

Quentin sees so much longing in Eliot’s eyes. He brushes his hand along his cheek and feels pulled towards him.

“Okay, yeah, let’s do it.”

Eliot looks more shocked than Quentin is that he said yes. 

Eliot opens his mouth in the form of a question, then closes it like he’s thought better of doubting if Quentin really means it. “Great.”

“Awesome.”

“Settled.”

Quentin burrows down to settle himself more fully against Eliot’s body.

* * *

Quentin dozes for a couple of hours. Every time he wakes up, he keeps expecting Eliot to have left, but he stays. He supposes watching people sleep really might be a common vampire activity. 

It’s in the early hours of the morning, the sun still about an hour out from rising. Quentin has shifted to rest his head on Eliot’s hip of all places, and Eliot is propped amongst the few pillows Quentin has and headboard. Eliot plays his fingers through Quentin’s hair, and he’s almost about to drift off again when Eliot starts talking. 

“After coming back to this town, it felt like the door to my human life was closed.” The night is so still Quentin can hear himself breathe, the only sound Eliot’s measured voice. “But now, I have a soul again, and not only do I have to contend with the asshole I was as a vampire, but I also have to deal with the scared asshole I was as a human. I thought I could just leave him behind.”

Something about that settles wrong inside of him, like Eliot is speaking his truth but it’s not the truth. Quentin chooses his words carefully. “You act like the person you used to be was nothing, like he was this horrible person you’re glad to be rid of.”

“I don’t know, Q. I used to be so ... small. Becoming a vampire made me larger than life.” Eliot looks around the room before settling his gaze back on Quentin. “It’s kind of horrible, but I almost hate human-me more than vampire-me, even after everything I’ve done.”

Quentin tucks himself as close to Eliot as he can in this position. “He was a kid, we were all just kids.”

Eliot stays quiet against him, wrapped close. Quentin hopes the silence means he’s taking it in, that maybe one day he can learn to be nicer to himself, especially the messy human parts. 

Eliot breathes a shaky breath, like maybe he’s holding back tears. Quentin gets the feeling this is something he’s been thinking for awhile, something that can only be said in the weird twilight hours of this strange night. Quentin is so grateful that Eliot can talk to him, tell him these things. 

Quentin wonders if he can completely let go with Eliot in the same way. He hopes so. 

Eliot’s chest settles back to a calm, dead still under Quentin’s body. Eliot slithers down the bed, fitting his head against Quentin’s neck and wrapping their naked bodies up tight.

“Let me take care of you,” Eliot whispers against his skin. After just baring himself, it astounds Quentin that Eliot wants to put that energy towards him, to being vulnerable with him.

“Are you up for it?” Quentin asks. 

“Yes. You just have to let me.” Eliot props up on an arm to look at him. 

“Okay.”

Eliot surges forward to kiss him, and Quentin doesn’t want to hold back now that Eliot is meeting him here. He wants: wants to let go in this man’s arms, wants to just let himself be happy for a moment. Can he do that? Can he let his brain rest for five seconds and just be here?

Quentin opens to Eliot, letting him plunge his tongue into his mouth. It’s different from their careful, reverent first time. Now, Eliot seems confident that Quentin isn’t going to run away at the first sign of interest and is determined to show Quentin just how interested he is. It’s a little heady.

“Can you- Do you ever bottom?” Eliot asks against his lips.

“Uh, yeah, is that- is that what you want?”

Eliot brushes the hair back from where it’s started to stick to the side of his face, the sweat of their entangled bodies gathering. “Yeah. Do you want it?”

Quentin nods his head, eyes wide and locked open with the intensity of Eliot’s gaze.

He has to dart away to grab lube from his drawer, and when he comes back Eliot is resting against the headboard like a king. His hair, his body, all of it looks pristine and untouched in the dim light.

Quentin kind of wants to fuck him up. Quentin kind of wants to  _ be  _ fucked up by him.

Eliot lays him out, hoists a leg up to get a hand at his hole, and the first light press makes Quentin gasp.

“It’s okay,” Eliot assures. Quentin doesn’t know when this turned into Eliot soothing him instead of the other way around. “I’ve got you.”

Quentin links a foot around the back of Eliot’s hip to open himself up further. The first slide feels a little strange, but he bears down and lets Eliot inside.

“Eliot-” Quentin starts with a breath as he pushes another finger in.

“I know.”

Eliot fingers him open, and Quentin’s legs are twitching with the mix of pleasure and anticipation. He wants. He wants so fully and wildly that it feels like it’s going to explode out from his chest and swallow them both whole. Eliot feels so good against him, his fingers deft and sure, and Quentin feels half-asleep, drunk on pleasure and intensity. 

“Eliot,” he says mindlessly, needing to say it, needing to ground himself in who is here with him in his bed. Eliot is here, and Quentin can let go.

“I’ve got you.”

Eliot fingers him for a good long while, long enough for Quentin’s legs to feel like jelly and his ass to feel as relaxed as it’s maybe ever felt. Honestly, he feels like - even with the pleasure coursing through his veins - he could fall asleep again right here like this.

Eliot whispers, “I’m gonna fuck you now.” Quentin moans, and Eliot slips a condom onto his cock and lubes himself up. His arms are wrapped so securely around Quentin so that their bodies are completely plastered together. With a hand between them, Eliot guides himself inside. “Take me.”

A half-moan, half-laugh is punched out of Quentin at the first slide inside. He’s so stretched but the fullness is sudden. Eliot is pressed down on top of him, holding him close, and Quentin wraps his legs behind him to get them even closer. Quentin doesn’t even know if he particularly cares about thrusting right now; he just wants Eliot inside.

“You’re so good. You feel so good.” Quentin preens under the praise. He’s almost surprised that Eliot is so nice and encouraging in bed. Part of him assumed that, when in control, Eliot might try to play up the cool vampire thing, try to seem larger than life again. Instead, he’s doing exactly what he said he would: take care of Quentin. 

Quentin wants to give the praise right back, “You’re so good, Eliot. This feels- You’re just everything.” Quentin groans at the start of a thrust. Eliot’s hips work against him steadily. The angle is good but not quite right, but Quentin doesn’t even care. This is about having Eliot as close as bodily possible, and he thinks they’ve achieved that.

It’s rhythmic, and beautiful, and it goes on long enough that even without any direct prostate stimulation and only the press of his cock between their bodies, Quentin can feel his pleasure start to get to that peak. As time goes on and Eliot shows no signs of stopping or faltering his pace, Quentin guesses Eliot was not lying about vampire stamina.

“Beautiful,” Eliot whispers against his skin.

Quentin has to stop clutching Eliot to reach a hand between their bodies, onto his cock. If he thought it felt good before, once he gets a hand on himself his pleasure rackets up to almost unbearable levels. He doesn’t want to come yet, but that means he has to keep starting and stopping, keeps barely jerking off and then moving his hand back to Eliot’s hip before starting again.

“Are you getting there?” Eliot asks, voice gruff and shaky with exertion.

“I’m so close,” Quentin murmurs.

“Let go, Q, come on my cock.”

Quentin fits a hand more securely around himself. Eliot clutches him close, keeps fucking into him, and Quentin can’t make himself hold on any longer. He jerks off until he’s spasming and groaning under Eliot. Eliot fucks him through it and then stills, coming quietly with his head pressed against Quentin’s neck.

Quentin glides his hands up and down Eliot’s back and holds him close. He feels naked and exposed. Intimacy is a risk - it’s always a risk - but Quentin is ready to make the leap of faith, and it looks like Eliot is ready, too. 

* * *

The whole gang is here for a celebratory hunt. There’s been a clan of vampires preying on people, and - with Alice’s research coming up empty for now - they need to deal with it. And it just so happens that with finals just finishing, they all need to work off some energy. After his night with Eliot, Quentin doesn’t know if he has any excess energy to give, but he’s excited to try out some of his new moves.

“Julia, behind you!” Quentin yells.

She glances back and sees the vampire who was making a break for it.

“Thanks, Q,” Julia says before sprinting after the vamp.

Kady and Penny double-team a pair of murderous cowboy vamps while Alice and Quentin deal with two more. His moves are a little sloppy, but he feels way more confident about himself now that he’s been training. He hopes he stays fresh even after going away on vacation for the next few weeks.

Quentin can’t believe he’s just going to up and leave for awhile. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do in two weeks, or two months, or even two years, but he has time to figure it out. Hell, he has all the time in the world if he wants it. It’s scary but exhilarating. Life is here, life is now, and he might be ready to go live it. 

Breathing in the crisp winter air, fighting vampires with his friends, Quentin realizes something: he’s not alone here. He was never truly alone, but he can feel it now. 

In this moment, Quentin is actually, legitimately content.

He’s alive, and that’s enough. He’s going to want things, and change, and grow. He’ll never be without his depression forever, but maybe he can keep the darkness at bay for a week, or a month, or a whole year. And maybe he’ll fall again, or his life will turn to shit, but he can remember that even for a moment, he was happy. And if he’s happy now, then that means he could be happy again.

Hope. It’s a dangerous and glorious thing.

The world is big, and Quentin is going to meet it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This started out as me just playing around with the idea of what vampirism could be a metaphor for in the world of The Magicians back in June, and ended up turning into this rewarding story about morality and hope and forgiving your younger self (and, of course, bloodplay). I’m happy I could finally put years of analyzing Buffy the Vampire Slayer to good use. Thank you to anyone who has read any part of this story. I’ve been a fandom lurker for so long, and it’s just so rewarding to finally create something big.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like, please feel free to leave me a comment or find me on tumblr as amagpie.


End file.
